Ill Fares the Land

[Peter11216]

Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt, Penguin 2010

This one is a bit of a complement to the Hedges’ book I reviewed earlier. Unlike Hedges' book, Ill Fare the Land has a tone of sadness and tragic loss. If Hedges is a cranky old man pissed off at the current state of affairs, Judt is a man mourning the loss post WWII society, sometimes known as the “Golden Age of Capitalism.” I may perceive some sadness in Tony Judt’s book, because I knew that he was writing it with the knowledge that he was dying. He died suffering from Lou Gerhig’s Disease last year, not long after the book was published.

Judt’s book is quite short. It consists of a series of essays discussing both Europe and the United States. He was a historian of post war Europe, but lived and taught in the United States until his death.

Judt certainly identifies with the left, however, he outlines and endorses a very conservative position in his essays. That is, conservative with its plain meaning, one who wishes to conserve stuff, free of (especially American) connotations. Judt’s view is that institutions of social democracy built up in the wake of the Second World War are being radically and recklessly torn down. His worry, which seems reasonable enough, is that those people who had been through the War, and understood something about the conditions that lead to it, are now gone. So-called Conservatives, which I would call radical stateists or perhaps progressive corporatists, are trying and have succeeded in many places in suddenly removing all the safeguards and protective measures against economic and societal upheaval that were slowly and carefully put in place over the last century.

He puts it this way, “Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing them: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?”

To me this is a very conservative statement. It puts into rather stark relief what is commonly called Conservatism in the United States, where it serves well to remember that these “Conservatives” (in both U.S. parties) have been the ones to embrace every new financial product, radically alter rules in place for decades on bank regulation, etc. That, almost everyone admits contributed or even created the financial crisis that resulted from the housing bubble burst. Was insisting that firms be allowed to “insure” assets that they don’t own (e.g. by using credit-default swaps), without any oversight really a conservative position?

On the global financial scene it worth looking at what has happened since the dismantling of the Bretton-Woods regime. The period after the end of Bretton Woods is described by Lance Taylor and John Eatwell (in their Global Finance at Risk, published before the Argentinian crisis & a reminder that many people foresaw what was coming) as one of “privatization of risk.” As private firms had to absorb the risk of currency fluctuations, it created the need for new financial products and thereby removed capital that would have been invested in the real economy during the Bretton Woods era. For homework, maybe you can try to find and look at financial crises between the end of WWII and the 1970’s. Off the top of my head I can think of several after, Mexican pesos crises in the 1980’s and 90’s, the Asian crisis around 1997, the Russian crisis around 1999, Argentina 2001, and our own global financial crisis in 2008. There is overwhelming evidence that the world has been made much more unstable due to the quite radical changes in finance, and its rise in relative size compared to real industries.

Judt’s book covers this briefly, but also contains more laments about the state of public infrastructure, welfare programs, and so forth within the nation state.

I very mush appreciate what Judt has to say about the necessity to conserve and defend. He notes, “’defensive’ Social Democracy has a very respectable heritage. In France, at the turn of the 20th century, the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès urged his colleagues to support small shopkeepers and skilled artisans driven under by the rise of department stores and mass production.” In fact, “it is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. From the war in Iraq through the unrequited desire to dismantle public education and health services, to the decades long project of financial deregulation, the political Right—from Thatcher and Reagan to Bush and Blair—has abandoned the association of political conservatism with social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefellor.”

Judt’s book is worth reading if for nothing else than the clarity and poetic succinctness with which he analyzes what has past and what is.

Consider: “If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.”

Best,

Pete

[Had a Joya de Nicagragua, 1970 Antaño while writing this. Can't say this lancero was great.]