Global Warping

Stop Global Warming II by Luminous Luminance at DeviantArt.

Wisdom from Grand Strategy Practitioner David Brooks:

National elections take place within a specific global moment.

True, they tried to repeal the laws of physics in 2014, but Boehner couldn't put the votes together. It was doomed when Tea Party members insisted on a poison pill provision repealing biology as well.

In the 1990s, there was a presumption that we were living in an age of rapid progress. Democracy was spreading. Tyranny was receding. Asia was booming. The European Union was building. Conflict in the Middle East was lessening. The world was cumulatively heading toward greater pluralism, individualism, prosperity and freedom.

It was raining gerunds. It was safe as long as you kept your windows closed. Twenty years later, though, it's starting to get old. And one of them, "receding", seems to have switched sides:

Democracy is receding. Autocrats like Vladimir Putin of Russia are marching. The European project is decaying. Economies are struggling. Reactionary forces like the Islamic State and Iran are winning. The Middle East is deteriorating.

So what's up with that, Doc? What's happened?

In this climate, the tone and focus of politics change. Politics is less about win-win situations and more about zero-sum situations.

It's moral climate change! Or climate change of subject, with the political aboutness going haywire, 80-mile-an-hour gusts in the zeitgeist, conceptual edifices flattened. That and a new take on game theory. It's global warping!

I'd like to pause here to note that something actually did happen, in 2003, that could have gotten a process like that going. This is when my kids were little and I spent a lot of time in playgrounds and one mom friend, a psychotherapist called Sonia, said quite explicitly that the US leaping into an unprecedented preemptive war would make everybody in the world more violent and unprincipled. She didn't actually mention Putin, and indeed you could argue he's following a different playbook, based on the 1990 conquest of Transnistria, but he's still fond of pointing out that the Iraq war and the Ukrainian whatever-it-is have something in common (even as he [a] continues to condemn the Iraq war and [b] continues to deny that Russia has in any sense invaded Ukraine—"It was terribly wrong, and I'd never do such a thing myself, but you have to admit I have a precedent"). You remember, of course, how excited David Brooks got at the thought of that other preemptive war, and if you don't there are reminders all over the place.

Of course if the Islamic State and Iran are both winning, that means win-win situations are still available, though Brooks may not be aware of it (one of Brooks's functions in the universe is to make people realize that it's possible to be far stupider and less informed than Tom Friedman, though we'd all like to deny it).

All sorts of famous people, on the other hand, are accused of being more into zero-sum games than the other kind, including Democrats such as President Obama ("started out as a hope-and-change idealist, but he has had to toughen to fit the times") and Christian Democrats like Bundeskänzlerin Angela Merkel ("shrewd, unemotional, nonidealistic, austere and interested in power").

The pugnacious Nicolas Sarkozy, of all people, is staging a comeback in France.

I just heard, by the way, from the New Republic, what old Sarkozy has actually been up to in his resumed capacity (after a two-year retirement) as leader of the former MPR, rebaptized Républicains, in the leadup to local elections on Sunday—taking his cue from Binyamin Netanyahu in trying to show the voters he can be just as fascist as the Front National, or possibly more so:

In a Hail Mary this week worthy of Netanyahu’s last minute heave, Sarkozy announced his opposition to students wearing the Muslim headscarf (not to mention the burqa) at university. Moreover, he declared that grade and high school cafeterias should no longer offer halal alternatives to their Muslim students. On those days pork is served, these students must either bring their own lunches or stare at empty plates. 

Don't know whether Brooks is aware of this last charming gesture, or the fact that it is not just a proposal but being carried out in some localities including Chalon-sur-Saône, and (obviously) applies to observant Jewish kids (and vegetarians) as well. He does write,

anti-Semitism is a good barometer of a worsening public mood. According to the Pew Research Center, acts of hostility toward Jews are now rampant in 39 percent of countries, up from 26 percent in 2007

but I doubt that he had Sarkozy's party in mind (and "rampant"?—Ew). He also fails to note that according to the Pew survey both Christians and Muslims had it worse:

As in previous years, Christians and Muslims – who together make up more than half of the global population – faced harassment in the largest number of countries. Christians were harassed, either by government or social groups, in 102 of the 198 countries included in the study (52%), while Muslims were harassed in 99 countries (50%).

It's hard to know what, if anything, he's really up to today, speaking of deterioration. He doesn't seem to be opposed in any particular way to all this promiscuous zero-summary, dissing J.E.B. Bush, in constrast to Christopher Christie and Scott Walker, for lacking it, with his "softer mien". The assignment from the Hidden Masters must have been to mount a little defense of old Netanyahu, which gets a throwaway graf somewhere in the middle, but not a very enthusiastic one:

He didn’t literally renounce the idea of a two-state solution forevermore. 

No, not forevermore. Just as long as he's in office.

Still, these comments and the ones on Israeli Arabs were blatant panders. He took Knesset seats away from parties to his right by becoming more like them.

Which is dangerously close to saying it was a bad thing because now the unspeakably fascist Yisrael Beiteinu (which has advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel proper by the forcible transfer of Arab citizens of Israel to West Bank Bantustans) won't have as many seats as it might have had.

There are the usual gestures to bipartisanship—Democrats are bad because they are zero-sum "redistributionist" instead of win-win "compassionate" (that Democratic party was so great back when George W. Bush led it, huh?) and Republicans are bad because they

emphasize entrepreneurial dynamism less and the threat of government elites more

which you can try to parse at your leisure. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu and Scottie Walker aren't in any important sense different from each other, except for VVP's "marching" and HRC's having a "Merkel-like toughness", meaning presumably the girl kind.

What I think it's really about, perhaps altogether unconsciously (because it's not as if he's planning anything out ahead of time at this point, and the shapes of the columns are getting increasingly random), could be explained in terms of that analogy we started with at the top, of climate change: he's acknowledging, preemptively, that it exists, in the form of all this rudeness and selfishness, but of course denying not just that it's partisan, but that it's human-made at all—maybe the global warping could be just a natural cycle (look how hostile people were in the 14th century, for heaven's sake!), or caused by sunspots. Had nothing to do, in any case, with Mr. David Brooks.