Militarist Nationalism

Andrew Higgins

"Russian authorities whose legitimacy rests in large part on the celebration of martial triumphs, most notably over Nazi Germany in World War II but also over rebels in Syria."

So let's talk about legitimacy. In this context legitimacy is the agreed right to rule; the acceptance by the majority of the population of the ruler's right to govern and its' tacit agreement to obey and be governed by laws made by this ruler (which is to say his/her government). This applies no matter what political system is under consideration. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia has devolved into a pseudo-democratic autocracy, similar to tsarism, but with Tsar Putin draped in the clothes of democracy. Legitimacy can only be dictated by an autocrat up to a point, as revealed by the collapse of tsarism last century; even then it needs a spark of circumstance to catalyse the process. Still, it is easier to manufacture legitimacy under Russian pseudo-democracy, than the versions practiced elsewhere.

In the above quote, Higgins points his finger at Russia, but this legitimacy thing is not restricted to the rivals of the USA. By the above definition there has not been a legitimately elected president for a majority of the past 4 or 5 elections, least of all Trump. Except for Obama, no president in the last 20-30 years has earned a majority of  the popular vote, so Trump has no legitimacy to govern and yet is allowed to continue.

So now let's talk about foundation myths; better yet, myths in general, and how they are used by political elites to maintain the status quo with them in control. Indeed myths, which take advantage of general manufactured ignorance in society and innate intellectual laziness, are one of the main tools at the disposal of governments, whereby they control the population.

Nationalism which culminated in the implosion of Europe through the industrialised World War of 1914-1945 is only harmful in its extreme form, as is the case with most things. A little bit of national pride and patriotism is not necessarily a bad thing. People have a sense of belonging to a group and are lifted by feelings of self-worth. Every brand of nationalism begins with a foundation myth. The Russian brand begins with what Higgins calls 'the celebration of martial triumphs' achieved in a sepia-tinged glorious mythical past. Most if not all foundation myths are martial in nature, so the US brand is couched in the War of Independence; the Australian brand in the Gallipoli Fiasco; the British in the colonial larceny of the 19th century etcetera. So these brands are militaristic in nature and seek to differentiate nations on the basis of  the size of their armies and armaments, thereby creating a hierarchy or world order of nations. You may have noticed that it's all starting to sound rather sinister.

Meanwhile the great Australian progressive journalist Van Badham has weighed into the fray with a piece in 'The Guardian' glorifying  the past of the Australian Labor Party:

"Don’t believe me? Consider what’s socially possible for the one-in-seven American households living in food poverty and compare it to the limitlessness of opportunity enjoyed by Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires. These uneven results are fomenting conditions in which the power of the billionaire class depends on the distractions of nationalism, racism and other forms of scapegoating to protect itself. With the election of Donald Trump, the tenets threaten to become structural." 

If you want sinister this is sinister bordering cynical conspiracy theory stuff laced with left-wing cliches. Higgins appears more balanced superficially. True balance must lie somewhere in between. Somewhere between 'a political ideology of some use in milder forms but harmfully self-destructive in concentrated form' and 'a distraction...a scapegoating to protect itself (the billionaire class)'

How do you create these myths? having created them how do you use them to create a reality in which you remain at the apex of the socio-political hierarchy? Historians explain societies in terms of estates. This concept dates back to the dark ages and basically means a tier in the social hierarchy. So: the first or highest tier is of course the Monarch; the nobles and clergy are probably of equal rank below that of the monarch; the third estate is usually recognised as the group composed of the peasants and the bourgeoisie; with reference to 18th century France, a fourth estate is usually tacked onto the end of this conceptual framework, The Media. This term refers to the means of conveying information to the populace. Manipulation of this fourth estate can create myths

"They (the Russian branch of the Jehovah's Witnesses) can be used to send a message.”

That message, it would seem, is that everyone needs to get with the Putin program — or risk being branded as an extremist for displaying indifference, never mind hostility, to the Kremlin’s drive to make Russia a great power again." 

Tipping Points

Jeff Sparrow

"In the past, activists sometimes suggested that climate politics transcended the old divisions between left and right. Even the greediest tycoon lived on the same planet as the rest of us. On that basis, the argument went, they could be won over in the fight to preserve it.

In reality, the environment’s always been a class issue. Climate change will devastate the poor – and the rich and the powerful will barely notice."

"a tipping point, a specific manifestation of the crisis so grotesque and so extreme as to force our leaders to respond." 

"The politicians and tycoons with their stock options and property portfolios will still find pleasant locales for their holidays, no matter how degraded the oceans become. They have as little personal stake in combating climate change as they do in fighting for housing affordability." 

"If the nationalism of right-wing populism inevitably feeds climate scepticism, protest against fossil fuels pushes in the direction of internationalism, fostering a common interest across national borders against the corporations and politicians despoiling the planet." 

Dana Milbank; The Washington Post

When are these curmudgeons going to get with the team, learn from mistakes, open their eyes. We live in a false crisis period of flux before the dawn of the Keynsian Capitalist Utopia (KCU). Keynes foresaw all of this, though perhaps not the fine detail or the complete ramifications.

The market has forced the low skilled onto the minimum wage, with little discretionary income. Economic activity involving the spending of money comes to a standstill. So growth almost freezes. In the mean time technology is on the verge of wiping out these very jobs. What will be the effect on the economy when 80% of the participants are so poor they can barley put food on the table. All of the companies making discretionary items (everything except clothes, food, heating perhaps; possibly electricity) 

There is no way the powers that be will allow this to happen, but people like these republicans seriously can not see the wood for the trees. They are blinkered by their neoliberal dogma so that they can not see any other way than what they have done before. They have lost the ability to learn from their mistakes

will go under. The economy will shrink down to a very basic level.

 The very definition of work will have to be redefined. Creativity, hopefully beyond the ability of AI for ever, will be at a premium. People can't survive in modern economies without spending money. The whole thing exists or doesn't on the basis of this fact. If people don't have sufficient spending money or work to earn it, the economy comes to a standstill and prices go into a nose-dive.

Experiments in Guaranteed Basic Income are being evaluated in Canada and other countries. This model taxes those who can afford it and pays everybody a living amount. The fear has always been that it wouldlead to a downward spiral in productivity with a resultant nosedive in growth. No evidence has emerged yet to this effect, indeed the results indicate neutral effect on productivity.

 

 Conservative forces worldwide are denying scientific evidence and making decisions on the basis of emotion and ignorant populist opinion. This is no good way to make decisions and is leading the world further down the dangerous road of extremism. This is what I mean when I say that we live in a period of flux. As the world gyrates around the edge of precipice of annihilation, people have to re-engage in politics. If everyone is fully engaged my faith tells me that good will prevail. More than ever our destiny is in the lap of God.

Abandon All Hope

So the federal election of 2016 is consigned to the dust bin of history and the peepole have spoken in their massively indecisive way with the delivery once again of a virtual hung parliament, Claytons hung, the hung parliament you have when you're not having a hung parliament. A massive outright majority of one to the conservative side. Of course if you ask SLOMO, aka Scott Morrison, our Claytons federal treasurer, the LNP won so massively that the majority could be rubbed in the oppositions' face like a pile of dog shit, and now the point of even looking at the Canberra shenanigans escapes me. We none-the-less need to learn something from the exercise.

SIHSECCN

Joelle Gergis ARC DECRA Climate Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

"A rapidly warming climate means that storms are now occurring in a “super-charged” atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so does the water-holding capacity of the lower atmosphere. The oceans are also warming, especially at the surface, driving up evaporation rates. Global average surface temperature has already risen by about 1℃ above pre-industrial levels, leading to an increase of 7% in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere."

I have actually been blogging for several years now about this stuff and it basically stands to reason that a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapour. The 7% rise per mean degree Celsius rise cited here is surprisingly large, but then I am not a meteorologist. If the water vapour component rises it then is only a question of if, when and where extra rain will fall.

Global warming is cited as mean degree Celsius rise in surface ocean temperature. People who have studied mathematics at all will recall that the 'arithmetic mean' (called an average by non-mathematical people) is a measure of central tendency. As such, by definition, in a data set of temperature measurements at different geographical locations, data points  will adopt the normal distribution bell curve centred on this mean. Therefore, an equal number of data points will be above as below this mean value.

A consequence of this is that there will be geographical locations which become wetter, as our self-induced human-species-existential-climate-change nightmare (SIHSECCN) unfolds, and also those which become drier. For the wetter/drier dichotomy one can substitute hotter/colder.

So an element of luck is introduced to the universe of human suffering. If you are lucky you will occupy land which gets cooler, but as mean global temperatures continue to rise these spots will comprise half of the land area. it's a poisoned chalice anyway because those who occupy the cooler spots will be conquered and/or subjugated by those who occupy the hotter regions.

Australia was once called the lucky country in a tongue-in-cheek book title. Now we will see how tongue-in-cheek this actually was.

As an afterthought: since we are forced live a cutthroat neoliberal existence, where are all the budding little entrepreneurs damming the floodwaters and selling the extra water back into the market? Probably the same place as the ones paving the deserts with solar panels and selling pristine electricity to the general population. In the future.

Trouble with Bubbles

Timo Henckel Research Associate, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Australian National University

Yes, Autumn is upon us again and the ides of march only passed a few weeks ago, so what a good time for the battle of the b-word to go bounding around the balustrades of the political discourse once again? This article is an eloquent explanation of asset bubbles in general, why this discourse never goes away and the characteristic of macroeconomics which draws me to it, sewn together with a succinct summary of cutting edge psychological macroeconomics. Anyone who is trying to comprehend economics to a level sufficient to understand the news should read this.

Essentially, the discourse never goes away because this field of study, probably more so than any other, is divided into political schools which are for ever in conflict with each other. So we have the 'Saltwater' school centred around the Ivy League Universities of the New England region in the USA, championed by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, of 'The Conscience of a Liberal' fame; the 'Freshwater' school centred around Chicago, championed by Joseph Stiglitz with the US Federal Reserve as its mouthpiece; the 'Austrian' school, centred on the EU, championed by Angela Merkel; and last but not least, at the cutting edge of  understanding, the school which has no name at this stage, but has a strong Australian contribution, which I shall now dub the 'Keensian' school after its Australian contributor, my friend Steve Keen centred in England. There are probably other schools in this turbulent field which I have missed but I think these are the main ones.

The Saltwater school is neo-Keynsian, fairly closely following the tenets espoused by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's in response to The Great Depression, and put into practice by FDR in the New Deal of those years. It practices a legally regulated market, laissez-faire government in the good times but intervention in the market to correct market failure when necessary, redistribution of wealth through taxation leading to an optimisation of social justice. As presently practiced in the Nordic Countries, its political expression is Democratic Socialism.

Favourite of the right-wing of the political spectrum, the Freshwater school is neo-classical in that it promotes economic paradigms which predate the Keynsian revolution and in fact go back to the 19th century. It promotes the idea of an unregulated market and minimal government intervention in the market. Since its inception the USA has conducted a huge experiment in socio-economic engineering by applying these principles to its society, until the shock of the Great Depression forced Keynsian ideas to the fore and the New Deal was born. When the New Deal principles stopped working in the 1970's (remember stagflation headlines) freshwater economists such as Milton Friedman hijacked macroeconomic practicum ushering in the great socio-economic experiment of the past 30-odd years beginning with Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Politically, this school expresses the neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies.

Another love-child of the right, the Austrian school, draws heavily on the work of  Friedrich von Hayek and his seminal work "The Road to Serfdom" (1944, University of Chicago Press). It is characterised by austerity policies and insists on budget and trade surpluses and is practiced in parts of Europe. Hayek wrote this in reaction to the work of  Keynes and it has been adopted by the right of the political spectrum as its guiding light.

Finally we have the Keensian school. A critique of the classical paradigm of economics has been ongoing since the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith in 1776, which forms part of the bedrock of modern macroeconomics to this day. Many of the assumptions on which modern economics is based are vastly over-simplified. In the theoretical 'market' all practitioners are assumed to be perfectly rational 'utility optimisers', meaning everybody in the market acts in a rational way to increase their wealth. The Keensian school recognises this assumption as utter nonsense because all practitioners are human beings who do not always act rationally, and employs modern psychology to attempt to better predict market behaviour, so that governments can proactively intervene in markets to smooth the massive gyrations characteristic of these things.

Henckel summarises this new field thus:

"This misconception is the consequence of human behaviour and traits that depart from the fully rational paradigm so often assumed in formal economics. Instead, as behavioural economists argue, people exhibit a number of biases.

These include, for example, the desire to find information that agrees with their existing beliefs (called confirmation bias) or the tendency to form decisions based on the most readily available information (called availability bias). People experience and seek to resolve their discomfort when they have two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values and they also employ simple abstractions in thinking about complex problems and events (framing).

People are poor intuitive statisticians and care more about avoiding losses than about experiencing gains (called loss aversion). The list of flaws in human behaviour goes on. Moreover, humans, social animals that we are, compete with and emulate our peers, herd like sheep and act on rumours."

Asset bubbles are a market failure. It is a function of government to correct market failures in such a way as to minimise social pain caused by them. It would make a lot of sense if economists, the supposed experts in such things, told us how to go about this. Instead here we have full admission from one of its highest academic practitioners that there is no agreed definition of  'asset bubble', and if you can't define it, you can't say for certain that one exists; and if one doesn't exist, then why would you do anything about it? This sounds a lot like a justification for laissez-faire government. It plays strait into the hands of right-wing parties.

"Economists disagree on how to define a bubble, or even whether bubbles exist. Intuitively, a bubble (and this applies to any asset, not just real estate) exists when the price of an asset is over-inflated relative to some benchmark. And here’s the rub: no one can agree on what that benchmark should be." 

As mentioned above, the modern academic field of economics started with the publication of  "The Wealth of Nations" (Smith, Adam, 1776). With close to a century's head start, the modern academic field of physical science began with the publication of "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (Newton, Sir Isaac, 1728{English}, 1687{New Latin}). Thus began a rivalry and jealousy that has lasted nearly 250 years. Economist looked on physical scientists, with their higher social standing; their absolute physical laws; their precise mathematical tools; their evidence-based scientific method, and were overcome with envy, so they endeavoured to mimic them.

You see economics had always been classed as a 'social' science, not a 'real' science at all, and economists wanted to be seen as real scientists, so economic theoreticians, from the start, adopted the bits of physical science they thought would make them look more like real scientists. Physics uses precise mathematical tools they saw:  "if we use precise mathematical tools too everyone will think we are real scientists", they thought to themselves. You can hopefully perceive desperation holding back my innate urge to unleash caustic wit in waves of ridicule upon this entire pretentious practice.

So this is why I find this topic so interesting.

My primary training is in physical science. I became aware of economics quite late, but have studied both of these fields to a high level. At masters level the economics being taught was laughable from a scientific perspective. I have to think this is the highest level of economics available. All of the bits of scientific methodology which make it work are tossed into the dustbin by economists. For nearly 250 years they have focused on the one aspect of physics they think will deliver them the status of true science: precise mathematical tools delivering absolute economic laws. This article shows that they can't even get the basics right. When a scientist says 'precise' that person means all the words, variables and concepts used have exact, black-and-white definitions, agreed and understood by all scientists. Asset bubbles have no definition of this sort, so any attempt to use precise mathematical tools to describe or analyse them is doomed.

This is not the only example: in fact economics is riddled with ambiguous concepts and abused methodology, but I shall leave it to my illustrious readers to find more.

In its quest to become a real science economics continues to evolve. It straddles the nexus between precise, austere, rational, logical, austere reality and messy, ambiguous, irrational, emotional, human reality. One day the twain may be met.    

    

The Old Australian Cultural Cringe

Ross Gittins

Ross Gittins knows his stuff and this article makes a great case against the business tax cuts. Why do something that only benefits foreign companies??? Same reason we don't have a minerals super profits tax (or at least a resource rent tax). Same reason we allow foreign companies to ruin our farmland and drinking water with fracking and the great barrier reef with coal mining. Fake government that won't stand up to the lobby groups.

This is just another expression of that 'old Australian cultural cringe' which the coalition in particular is addicted to. They live in the past when Britain ruled the waves and Australia was just a supplier of raw materials for the factories of the mother country, except now we can just substitute 'Big Business' for 'Britain' and a spade becomes a spade. They have sacrificed our sovereignty on the alter of capitalism.

It comes to the point where we don't control our own property, our own destiny, our own lives. Control has been handed to the big multinationals. All they have to say is 'give us special treatment or we will take our business elsewhere', and people swallow this bunkum. So what if they do?

Working Class Heroes

Capitalist elites have always sent the poor; the not-so-well educated; the downtrodden (who are trodden down by the myth of competition and the false competitive nature of the human species projected onto reality by these elites), out to die in the pits of of industrialised warfare.

Always remember: we are all born brothers and sisters of the same genome, designed by our creator to live in bounteous peace and harmony on this plentiful planet.

The only things preventing this from happening are the Capitalist Elites controlling the reins of political power and projecting their warped concepts of value, price/cost, work, labour....etc. onto the reality they have created restricting the the spread of knowledge to they own ilk.

The accuracy of John Lennon's assessment is somewhat eloquent:

"If you want to be like the folks on the hill,

First you must learn to smile as you kill,...

...

A working class hero is something to be"

Ideology vs. Rationality

Eric Beinhocker

"If 2008 was the year of the financial crash, 2016 was the year of the political crash. In that year we witnessed the collapse of the last of the four major economic-political ideologies that dominated the 20th century: nationalism; Keynesian Pragmatism; socialism; and neoliberalism. In the 1970s and 80s the centre right in many countries abandoned Keynesianism and adopted neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 90s the centre left followed, largely abandoning democratic socialism and adopting a softer version of neoliberalism.

In 2008 that consensus was rocked, last year it crumbled. Some will cling on to the idea that the consensus can be revived. They will say we just need to defend it more vigorously, the facts will eventually prevail, the populist wave is exaggerated, it’s really just about immigration, Brexit will be a compromise, Clinton won more votes than Trump, and so on. But this is wishful thinking. Large swathes of the electorate have lost faith in the neoliberal consensus, the political parties that backed it, and the institutions that promoted it. This has created an ideological vacuum being filled by bad old ideas, most notably a revival of nationalism in the US and a number of European countries, as well as a revival of the hard socialist left in some countries."

Yes indeed, politics started polarising alarmingly from the shock of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. France, the US and Australia all took a jump to the left with the election of mildly progressive governments. This produced a reaction in the conservative forces in these countries which has witnessed the revival of some of the most destructive right-wing ideologies of the 20th century: fascism, national socialism, extreme nationalism, superficial populism, demagoguery. Hopefully it will all settle down eventually to a new consensus ideology based on rational fact and evidence-based policy. Has anyone seen any pigs in the sky lately?

Democratic Socialism is the way to go but conservatives are very good at demonising it, asserting its equivalence to Stalinism and the worst  forms of 20th century communism. How totally absurd??? All you have to do is observe and analyse the highly successful European countries following this ideology. The Nordic countries lead the way. Perhaps it is time for a new Viking influence across the globe. The postwar period in the US was a reasonable approximation also but they walked away from it.

No one appears to have analysed the inevitable consequences of following extreme neoliberalism coupled with globalisation of capital. Financial capital flows across borders, while human capital is constrained. This allows pockets of low labour cost to develop, which are then used by multinationals to build their factories, maximising their profits by minimising labour cost. It's all so artificial, in fact it amounts to extreme market failure, for the jobs which go off-shore are not replaced in the host economy. Widespread poverty results, the gap between rich and poor widens, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.

If there were free movement of human capital a natural hierarchy of income, or equilibrium, could be established through market mechanisms. The trend is really egalitarian. Those making obscene amounts of money would have their income reduced to an adequate level while the poor would have their's lifted to an adequate level. Democratic Socialism attempts to do this through taxation and income redistribution, but it is actually the endpoint of an unfettered market where all factors of production are allowed to move freely through the market. Such a reality would require a single world market. Until this happens Democratic Socialism is the best we can hope for.

Which brings us back to Keynes. In his later years the prescient one was asked where he thought it was all going too end. Where we were headed in other words. He replied that there would be an extended period of cheap money (low interest rates) which would cause there to be such an abundance of all material things that everything would be so cheap that all people could have everything they want. I call this the Keynsian Capitalist Utopia (KCU) and I believe we are actually already living in this utopia but artificial market failures, such as the above mentioned immobility of human capital, are masking its full effect. Since 2008 we have seen hyper-low-interest rates in many countries, even going negative at times. In its ninth year of very cheap money, the GFC reaction has seen governments printing money nonstop, bailing out big banks and trying to get their economies growing again, but inflation is minimal and employment is low. If the KCU were allowed to become real, all the financial elites would be wiped out, so I believe they must be manipulating the market, as they have always done historically to maintain the status quo and their position at the apex 0f the social hierarchy.

The thing about ideologies is that extremes are destructive but most have good, positive, progressive aspects as well as the destructive. If we had some sort of rationalism as our ideology we could pick out the good bits and combine them into something beneficial. As one uses the right tool for the right job, we must find the right ideology to guide our fortunes in the 21st century.

The First Myth

This myth that both parties are as bad as each other is bunkum. If both parties are the same why bother changing your vote. It's promulgated by the conservatives to maintain the status quo where they have a stranglehold on power. 

What they are doing to this country is so destructive. Much more and there will be no way back and we will wind up as an irrelevant backwater whose only value is its willingness to bend over and be raped for its raw materials. 

To take just one example, our coal reserves have zero value in a world that doesn't burn coal to produce energy. Even right now technology is being produced to generate electricity without burning fossil fuels. LNP policy is to continue with coal, defund education so that we lack the skills to contribute to this technological revolution, and deny us a fibre network fore internet delivery making us physically unable to head in this direction, while the political elites run around wasting money on useless junkets for them and their families and friends.

The reality is that the only alternative to an LNP government is an ALP government or some sort of coalition of the left. I am now a member of the ALP even though my position in the political spectrum is well to the left. Politics is about compromise and it is when extremists come to power who refuse to compromise at all that bad things happen.

Back in 2011 I gave the electorate the benefit of the doubt. The poor people were just hoodwinked into believing the LNP myths racism and misogyny by a conservative controlled mainstream media. It's not their fault I thought. The forces of light just need to campaign harder.

I've  now decided that the people really are sheeple, too stupid to think logically, recognise evidence- based reasoning, easily frightened through misinformation and post truth reality put out by elite-controlled MSM, and at the end of the day too lazy to be bothered to think. I have some sympathy for them. Really their reality has been formed by the wrecking-ball extremist neoliberal policies pursued by western "democracies" since 1980. This discredited  ideology is based on myths and false assumptions. I've been rattling on about this fact for more than eight years now.

As a card-carrying member of the ALP I am in a position to know a few things you may not be aware of. The ALP has reformed itself to some degree at least. They are about grass roots campaigning now and there are significant points of difference which should be considered when deciding who to vote fore. There is an outstanding progressive policy agenda but the following needs to be implement in addition to this.

The ALP needs to throw off its starry-eyed grass-roots political naivety and realise how biased this so-called "democracy" has become towards the ruling kleptocracy, keeping it perpetually in power to the extreme detriment to our society; our spiritual and material well-being. They should aggressively publicise this simple message:

"The LNP is the party of the rich. They represent the interests of the rich. If you are not rich NEVER VOTE FOR THIS PARTY"

Things change and people need to change accordingly
.
Pardon me but my soapbox just disintegrated

End of an Era

Van Badham

She's always a good read, and possibly betters me on eloquence, but this is one of my pet topics, which I've been blogging on about for years, so here we go again.

"Neoliberal economic policy has defined the Australian Labor party as much as it has their opponents for the past few decades, yet now Labor’s once-fiercest neoliberal champions have come to disavow it. 

The conspicuous lack of outcry, keening or ceremonial hand-wringing around the end of this era is perhaps attributable to Ben Chifley’s example. “It’s no good crying over spilt milk,” the former Labor prime minister once advised, “all we can do is bail up another cow.”"

Neo-liberalism, and its obsession with 'free' markets, was devised in an era when the US was economically competitive. In open competition, an assumed innate characteristic of 'free' markets - a total imaginary theoretical construct since true free markets have never existed at a macroeconomic level; and may not actually be possible in the real world - the US would almost always win. Trumpism is an admission that this is no longer the case.

If we count the beginning of the great neo-liberal economic experiment as coincident with the election of Ronald Reagan in the US in 1980, it's been running for 37 years now and the early regulatory response to the GFC really marks the beginning of the reaction against it. Van cites twenty years. In the US this experiment has been running a lot longer. US society is really the result of a long-running experiment in neo-liberal socio-economic engineering. You would have to say that the results are in and, as predicted by theory, they don't really look too good.

Too understand these things we have to go back to the 70's. Remember the oil shock which caused a phenomenon headlined as 'stagflation' which completely bamboozled the economists of the time to such an extent that we saw conservative president Nixon implement a wage/price freeze, something more in character with a command economy. This really marks the end of the halcyon postwar period of Keynesian New Deal economic policy which contributed to the rise of functional welfare states in much of the West.

In the field of economics the Keynesian New Dealers had controlled policy since 1929 while the classical economists were easily blamed for the Great Depression and therefore in disrepute. Suddenly 'stagflation' (inflation without GDP growth) was happening and the Keynesians could not explain it nor recommend a cure. Off they went to their ivory towers to ponder this puzzle, scratching their heads in consternation, vacating the political discourse.

Enter Milton Friedman, scion of what was now called the neoclassical school of economics, what Paul Krugman calls the 'Freshwater' school    

On the Balance of Probabilities

You can't trust the veracity of any information issuing from the white house and the way it is going no one will be able to tell truth from fiction pretty soon. People will have to read everything, especially in the blogs and social media, and weigh up the balance of probabilities to come to a conclusion about where the truth lies. Who has time for that?

The background to all this is the press conference given by Trump's press secretary in the wake of the inauguration. Each sentence was a demonstrable lie.  The journalists sat there, swallowed these  lies without any enquiry or analysis, and regurgitated them intact back out into the mainstream media. Even the ABC just showed the guy standing there describing a post-truth fantasy reality with a straight face, in a monotone. Even though this body language sets the alarm bells ringing, I didn't know for certain the statements were suspect until I checked out twitter. I still don't know the exact reality.

It all comes down to the inauguration. Was there the biggest crowd in history as Trump would have us believe or was there a meagre turnout bolstered by hire-a-crowd extras bussed in and paid for with Trump's obscene wealth? No doubt the truth falls somewhere between these two extremes but the balance-of-probabilities method becomes inapplicable in a hyper-polarised political environment as has now developed.

Journalism was once the guardian of truth. Journalists need to step up and do their jobs better. The media scrum facing this Trumpic fantasy needed to grill the guy to expose the lies. Now that would be entertaining. Imagine the response if he were confronted with an alternative version. Would he sweat? Would he dissemble? Would he disappear in a puff of post-truth smoke?

I've never actually looked at the Nazi propaganda of Joseph Goebbels but I suspect there would be striking similarities to this stuff. Basically it all comes down to the fact that, if you scream a lie loudly enough and often enough, it becomes the truth. It's all getting so Orwellian. We will need Trump-speak translators installed in all our devices.

Here is an analysis by a former Presidential press secretary:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2wCbaBXAAApIyq.jpg:large   

An example of the sort of ridicule floating around 

Sean Spicer releases new photo showing true size of crowd for Trump's inauguration



and some serious analysis from a news source of high reputation.

Jeffrey Goldberg ‏@JeffreyGoldberg  19h19 hours ago

.@fordm deconstructs Sean Spicer's false claims (via @TheAtlantic):

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/inauguration-crowd-size/514058/

There is still no way to judge the balance of probability. Trump is an extremist. His behaviour mirrors that of a spoilt child. The alternative view may be equally extreme. How are we to judge which is more probable? The contrasting images above purporting to be of the Obama inauguration of 2008 on the right and Trump's on the left have been portrayed as simply one image before it started and another when it was in full swing. who are we to believe?

One tool of the propagandist is the creation of doubt in the minds of the target, so this portrayal is suspect especially because the source then proceeded to criticise the media as not to be trusted. For me past performance and reputation are the key to balancing the probability. The Atlantic has been around a long time and built up an extremely high reputation for truth and integrity. On the balance of probabilities I'll go with them 

Hindsight

With the benefit of hindsight the 2016 US Presidential election turned out to be between the democrats, representing the stutus quo vadis, more of the same, the establishment; and Trump, a populist demagogue of the far right. So it was a battle between the far right and the center. The far right won because Trump said polpulist, radical things that made people vote for him because they were fed up with business as usual and wanted to vote for radical far right populism.

Bernie Sanders was about as far left as you can get in US politics and was also a populist in the strict sense of the word, funded as his campaign was by grass roots support. His views and policies are really only centre-left but would have been portrayed as radical left, and many of his supporters came out when he didn't win the nomination saying that, given the choice beween a vote for Clinton, a vote for Trump or not voting at all, they would not vote at all.

The electorate was in the mood to punish the establishment by electing a radical. They were given the choice between the establishment and the radical right. If Sanders had been allowed to win the nomination the choice would have been between a rightwing radical and a leftwing radical. A radical was going to win in any event and only the radical of the right was available as a choice. The result was really a forgone conclusion.

The DNC had polling to indicate  this state of the electorate but chose Clinton and therefore must shoulder some of the blame; but aside from that how can you call a system democratic  where

      "The party has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential
        elections",

but not won the presidency in five of them?