Inquisition Mode
Tariq Ali 
Notebooks: 1936-47 by Victor Serge 

translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.
NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9

Mexico​ city, 6 July 1946. Victor Serge had a year to live. He had spent the morning, as he sometimes did, with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. They had been writing a joint memoir of Trotsky; in it Natalia recalls her husband pacing up and down in his study at Coyoacán, engaged in heated imaginary conversation with old dead Bolsheviks, arguing about Stalin, and how and why they had been defeated by him. Serge noted that Sedova wasn’t looking well:

What gnaws at her in reality is an immense bereavement, infinitely greater than that of Lev Davidovich, which only finished her off. It is grief for an era and an uncountable crowd. And since I’m probably the only person to truly share this with her, our discussions are precious to us, but I nevertheless avoid touching on the numberless dead. Despite us, they rise up: the tomb of a generation is always present. This time ... we recalled Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, who died in prison.

Serge also recalls an evening in Moscow around 1930, when Mandelstam had seemed nervous and uneasy. Serge asked him what was wrong. Mandelstam replied: ‘It’s that you’re a Marxist.’ Serge understood. ‘When I showed him a volume of photos of Paris by night, the strain between us quickly evaporated.’ On another occasion, he ‘stupidly attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of too low a window’. In 1935, the year before Serge was expelled from the Soviet Union, Mandelstam jotted down a few satirical lines about how all of them, ‘unpersons’ by this point, might be remembered:

What street’s this one?
– ‘This is Mandelstam Street.
His disposition wasn’t “party-line”
Or “sweet as a flower”.
That’s why this street –
Or, rather, sewer
Or possibly slum –
Has been named after
Osip Mandelstam.’

As a writer Serge has often been compared – foolishly, I think – to Koestler, Silone, Orwell, Camus. But he’s so much better. Liberalism, despite a few clumsy attempts, has not been able to appropriate him. Serge knew better than most how to interpret and record the hopes, fears and defeats that marked a political life dedicated to resistance and revolution. His life spanned the First World War, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the triumph and defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, the rise of Franco. These Notebooks, which include some recently discovered material, cover the last decade of his life.

Much has been written about Serge’s life, first and foremost in his own Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Susan Weissman provided a meticulous account in Victor Serge: A Political Biography, published in 2001. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, Serge was the son of poverty-stricken intellectuals who had fled tsarist Russia. The family name itself was suspect. One of his relatives, Nikolai Kibalchich, a chemist by training, had built the bomb that killed Alexander II in 1881. Along with other members of the underground anarchist group which had planned and carried out the assassination – including Sophia Perovskaya, whose father, the governor general of St Petersburg, was responsible for the tsar’s travel and security arrangements – Kibalchich was hanged. But he was celebrated after the revolution and commemorated as a rocket pioneer on Soviet stamps of the 1960s.

In his late teens, Serge, like Kibalchich, was attracted to radical anarchism. After moving to Paris, he joined the Bonnot Gang, a courageous but nutty group intent on committing violent acts, including bank robberies. After one confrontation, Serge was arrested, taken to the prison of La Santé and made an offer. If he gave an account of the group’s leaders he would be rewarded and released. He refused, and was given a five-year prison sentence for conspiracy. On his release in 1917 he went to Barcelona, which is where he was when the news came of revolution in Russia. In Spain, factory workers and trade unionists rejoiced, and a Workers’ Committee was set up to prepare for a revolutionary general strike. Serge noted that in France too an ‘intensely alive electric current was crossing from the trenches to the factories, the same violent hopes were coming to birth’. Militias were organised by workers in Barcelona and unions opened discussions with the Catalan liberal bourgeoisie, with the aim of getting rid of the monarchy – but the movement, isolated geographically and politically, was defeated.

Serge decided it was time for a visit to his ancestral homeland. It wasn’t easy: it took him a year and a half. First, he went back to Paris, where he visited the Russian military HQ on the avenue Rapp, whose officers were now all ‘good republicans’. They were polite, but couldn’t help him. Soldiers from the Russian Expeditionary Force based at the military camp of La Courtine had demanded immediate repatriation to Russia, but the French refused to allow it – and the soldiers mutinied, only to be crushed by French artillery fire. Serge was eventually sent to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, and arrived in Petrograd in January 1919. Hunger and typhus gripped the city. When he went to the party headquarters to join up, the local commissar for foreign affairs asked: ‘What are they saying about us abroad?’ ‘They’re saying that Bolshevism equals banditry,’ Serge said. ‘There’s something in that,’ the commissar replied. ‘You’ll see for yourself.’ Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution conveys the mood of this period brilliantly. Hope and despair mingle in its pages.Revolutionary movements depend on hope. When they’re successful, their supporters can see the path to liberation and happiness, a glimpse of the imagined future. But the transition to that future, always difficult and far removed from these ideals, poses serious problems for many revolutionaries. Some of them despair and sink into political apathy, moral indifference, navel-gazing. A minority continue to insist that if the means bear little or no relationship to the ends, the means will become the ends. They write or say this in public and are silenced or punished for it. Serge belonged to this group. He refused to put down his pen or moderate his opinions. He was lucky that it didn’t cost him his life. For most of the 1920s Serge worked for the Comintern, his Soviet passport of the civil war period describing him as ‘General Staff/Red Army’, and he wrote in support of Lenin’s complaints about the growing bureaucratisation of the party and the ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ that sidelined Georgia and other nations.

After Lenin’s death, he became a supporter of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, and in 1933 was sent into internal exile in Orenburg, near the Kazakh border. L’Affaire Victor Serge caused a scandal in Paris, where he was known to the French left as a great defender of the Soviet Union. André Gide interceded on his behalf and Romain Rolland spoke directly to Stalin, who released Serge in 1936, authorising his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Serge, along with his first wife and children, went into exile again, first to Belgium and then to France. The NKVD gave him a receipt for the manuscript they confiscated, a book about prewar France to be called ‘Les Hommes perdus’, but all attempts to track it down during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods failed. He had never again, Serge said, had time to reread and edit his writing. The other books were rushed, written in instalments with Stendhalian energy, and sent to far-off publishers.

Many of his comrades were exterminated following the show trials, which he later called the ‘midnight of the century’. What shook Serge and Trotsky, with whom he began to correspond after his expulsion, were the ‘confessions’, which appropriated the language and methods of the Spanish Inquisition. Zinoviev, one of Lenin’s closest comrades, with whom Serge had worked at the Comintern in the early 1920s, ‘confessed’ thus: ‘My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.’ (The inquisitors of the 18th century were better writers. Compare: ‘I am a satellite and disciple of Satan. For a long time I was a porter at the gate of hell, but several years ago, with 11 of my companions, I began to lay waste the kingdom of the Franks. As we were ordered, we destroyed the corn, the wine and all the other fruits produced by the earth for the use of man.’) One of the few non-communists to defend the trials was Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, who claimed to find the confessions persuasive. Serge regarded them as a consequence of the insistence that party decisions had to be supported whether ‘right or wrong’. For him, the result was an ‘abdication of consciences in the face of a party that had lost its soul’.Many of the survivors of the Bolshevik movement, tired and forlorn, resigned themselves to passive support of the measures taken by Stalin, even when they were irrational and unjustifiable. European fascism was seen as the main enemy. Had Trotsky not warned endlessly in 1931-32 that the birth of fascism and the growing support for it in Germany necessitated a united front of all anti-fascists, especially communists and social democrats? (Later, in December 1938, Trotsky predicted what would follow: ‘It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.’) Serge agreed that fascism had to be defeated however high the cost, but he parted company with many others on the left (Brecht, Benjamin et al) when they insisted that a political truce with Stalin was necessary if that battle was to be won. For Serge this was impossible. Within weeks of his arrival in the West in 1936, he began writing articles and pamphlets denouncing the Moscow trials. Alas, at the time of the Popular Front in France, criticism of Stalin was taboo. Most of Serge’s exposés, based on intimate knowledge of the defendants, were unpublishable, and he was forced to earn his living as a proofreader for the same socialist newspapers that rejected his articles.

Trotsky remained his mentor and friend. Serge loved him despite all their disagreements and translated his essays into French with great enthusiasm and care, improving them along the way. Serge remembers Trotsky hopping off his armoured train during a brief stopover in Moscow in the early 1920s, rushing straight to the translation office of the Comintern, and depositing a hurriedly knocked off 300-page ‘pamphlet’ on Serge’s desk. ‘Must be translated quickly. My response to the slanders of the German social democracy.’ Title? ‘Terrorism and Communism.’ Serge recognised very early that, no matter where Trotsky’s journey ended, he would never become a person of the type mocked by Hegel, someone who would collapse and ‘fall like empty husks’ once his ‘mission in history’ was over. Serge himself was no different.

Stalin’s agents, led by the ever reliable NKVD killer Leonid Eitingon, finally caught up with Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940. By then, Germany had invaded France and Serge was trying to leave the country. He and his son managed to get places on the last boat to leave Marseille. The long, exhausting sea journey that ended, months later, in Mexico City provided ample time for writing. The Notebooks contain vivid descriptions of the coastline as the freighter full of refugees skirted the North African coast and headed in the direction of Martinique. André Breton was on board; so was Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both were wonderful raconteurs. There are caustic pen portraits of French and Soviet writers and politicians, and descriptions of other passengers. The forward section is ‘densely populated but maintains a chic tone because of a group of filmmakers and well-dressed emigrants with cash who put on airs as if they were at a café on the Left Bank’; the Bretons and Lams lounge on the upper deck, as Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s wife, ‘sunbathes almost completely nude and scorns the universe which, by ignoring her, vexes her’. Dr S, a French colon and member of the Tunisian Grand Council, is anxious to show Serge something hidden in his cabin:


He unveils a small painting, in fact quite lovely, a recumbent woman dressed in warm blues: it’s a Manet, the portrait of the painter’s wife, dated 1873, bought in Algiers second-hand for ‘five hundred francs, can you imagine!’ Five hundred francs, five thousand, or five million, I don’t give a damn, but to save a painting, to take joy in this, to save a moment of its soul at the moment when the great ship ‘Civilisation’ risks sinking to the bottom with all its Sistines and its Curie laboratories is good, Doctor, is splendid! We drink a glass of cognac – almost friends.

There are interesting conversations with a cultured Viennese bourgeois, who introduces himself as a banker and is on his way to a new life in Brazil. He looks at Serge expectantly. ‘I’m a friend of Mr Trotsky,’ Serge says. To his amusement, the banker tries to conceal his disappointment.

Serge arrived in Mexico City a year or so after Trotsky’s assassination. Observing the war from his remote exile, he wrote in his Notebooks on the anniversary of the revolution: ‘Gloomy anniversary of October. Leningrad and Moscow besieged, Rostov lost, Crimea invaded. How distant am I, despite myself, from the Russian nightmare. And for the first time, I try to imagine it as in some way abstract. Otherwise it would be intolerable.’ Serge himself was soon under attack. As his Notebooks show, the local press, by then under Russian influence, refused to publish his pieces, and a meeting at which he attempted to speak was attacked by Communist Party goons and one of his friends badly injured.

On 15 May 1946, a year before his death, he suffered what may have been a mild heart attack. ‘I was suddenly seized by one of those oppressive dizzy spells that have been striking me very frequently of late, and which weaken me to a distressing extent,’ he wrote in his Notebooks. ‘My heart starts to beat strongly and unevenly, a psychological anxiety ... in the upper chest, more to the left it seems to me, and when it’s really bad I feel such a buzzing vertigo mounting to my head that I fear falling, that remaining upright is becoming impossible.’ He goes on:


The idea of the proximity of death, appearing more clearly than in other recent similar circumstances, causes me no fright, no fear, and isn’t even a real hindrance in my daily activities. The hindrance is physical and great: I am afraid of wandering at random, not knowing whether the dizziness will appear unexpectedly. I feel myself to be in a state of readiness, ready to leave, to disappear simply. Not without effort, I tried to attain and thought I had attained this state of calm readiness at the internal prison of the GPU in Moscow in 1933, when I envisioned my execution. Today I think that at the time I believed I had attained it more than I attained it in truth, and I succeeded in achieving a calm more apparent, more superficial than profound.

Now, whether from the wearing down of life or from a more assured serenity (with its deep-down dose of despair), my readiness is more sure. Enough, in any case, that I do not feel any obsessive anxiety and have not lost the taste for anything I love: those close to me, life, ideas and work ...

A sensual attachment to life, even in its details, its dailiness, a ceaseless curiosity about the earth and ideas.

The wish to see better days, or at least the beginning of better days.

The frustration at being interrupted in the middle of my activity, with a matured mind, a personality filled with detritus but somewhat purified. The disagreeableness of not holding out until some form of victory in the long combat.

Despite​ personal setbacks and political defeats, Serge never renounced or denounced the revolution. In her introduction to a reissue of his finest novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Susan Sontag tried to enlist him in the ranks of ‘anti-communists’. Whatever else, he was never that. He defended the historical validity of the Russian Revolution until the end of his life; he accepted that the ‘germs of Stalinism’ were present from the start, but insisted that there were ‘many other germs as well’. His painter son, Vlady Kibalchich, whom I met a number of times in Mexico City and who was very close to his father, was firm on this point. Serge was a heretic who remained on the left, never a Cold War renegade who sang the virtues of capitalism or colonialism. Had he done so, many avenues would have opened up for him in the West. His books would have been published and liberal magazines would have competed to get hold of his essays. There would have been no shortage of funds. He might have lived longer. As it was, he was largely dependent on handouts from fans in New York, where Dwight and Nancy Macdonald were especially generous despite their differences.

Serge died in a taxi in Mexico City on the way to see his son. He was 56. His jacket was frayed. His shoes had holes in them. His unidentified body was lying on a slab in the police station where his son found him. He had left a poem:
A night filled with stars, a darkness filled with you:
So that I could love you I had to understand this world
And before I could understand the world, I had to love you.

In his writing, Serge dealt with the street tumults and upheavals of his own time and place, at times excited and inspired, at others repelled by the loud march of history. He was a chronicler and analyst of defeats, of historical regression and its causes, of the fearful shadows of unfettered power. The Notebooks are a treasure chest. The form itself is peculiarly (if not exclusively) French, even if the two most famous examples were written in German and Italian. Marx’s Grundrisse, seven notebooks of self-clarifications developing his ideas and earlier work, was posthumously published in Moscow in 1939 and 1941. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in an Italian fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, contain essays on the state, civil society, the role of intellectuals, Fordism, Italian history and more. Written in an elliptical style to deceive the prison censors, they had a huge influence on political and cultural debates on almost every continent in the mid-20th century. These were exceptions. In most notebooks, elements of a personal diary are present, if not dominant, and such carnets may be intended for publication. Reflections on history, art, philosophy, literature, politics and sexuality are not uncommon. In Serge’s case there is an additional element: a summary of a life foretold, a warning to future generations (don’t repeat our mistakes), a last will and testament. A balance sheet.

More than half the contents of the new edition were first published in 1952 by Julliard. For unknown reasons, Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s daughter, Jeannine, when directly asked if she had any papers of Serge’s. However, after her death they ended up in her personal archive, where somebody noticed them and brought them to the attention of [the Mexican academic] Claudio Albertani (to whom Laurette also denied having any Serge papers), and he was able to photocopy them and eventually publish a complete French version of the Carnets.

When Weissman finally managed to interview her, Séjourné said: ‘Why do you want to write his biography? He was nothing.’

Rereading The Case of Comrade Tulayev, written during Serge’s time in Mexico, I was reminded of Eisenstein’s imagery in Ivan the Terrible – the novel has much to teach us in these bad times. It tells the story of the Soviet purges, starting with the assassination of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad. An apolitical citizen with a revolver kills a senior party official. Others pay the price: men and women of Serge’s political generation, some of whom were his friends and relations. He returned to this theme in his last novel, Unforgiving Years, a bleak, pessimistic, lyrical, frightening book, devoid of hope. Set during the Second World War, it was first published in France in 1971 and then in English in 2008 by NYRB Classics, which is gradually publishing Serge’s complete works. The two need to be read in tandem. Many of the characters in the later novel are dazed and demoralised Soviet intelligence agents in Paris. One of them is based on a real-life agent codenamed Ludwig, Ignace Reiss, who said that ‘in times like these it is easier to die than to live.’

When I read The Case of Comrade Tulayev for the first time, in the 1970s, I was struck by Serge’s surprisingly realist, if not sympathetic, assessment of Stalin. In the Notebooks, there is an explanation of sorts, given in answer to a question posed by the French-Polish novelist Jean Malaquais: ‘And Stalin, you think, wasn’t a traitor? To have massacred Lenin’s party, made the Russian Revolution what it’s become, is that not treason?’ Serge replies:


In polemical terms, perhaps ... But I don’t like polemical terms that do violence to the truth. In my blocked novel I think I presented an accurate psychological portrait of Stalin. He didn’t break faith, he changed, and history marched on: he bears the heavy burden of a mediocre and powerful personality. He believes in his mission: he sees himself as the saviour of a revolution threatened by ideologues, the idealistic and the unrealistic (recall Napoleon’s contempt for the ideologues). He fought them as he could, with his inferiority complex, his jealousies, his terror of men superior to him and whom he couldn’t understand. He cast them from his saviour’s path by the only methods he had at his disposal: terror and lies, the methods of a limited intelligence governed by suspicion and placed at the service of an immense vitality.

He made himself and circumstances made him the leader, the symbolic figure of a vast new formation of parvenus of the revolution; headstrong, tough, unscrupulous, clutching on to power, living in fear and panic and claiming to embody the victorious revolution. In reality, they incarnated a new phenomenon that socialist theory never predicted: the totalitarian economic state, one of too weak a culture to allow individual freedom, and thus fated for state-directed thought. Directed thought means at one and the same time absolute confidence in oneself, material confidence, and fear of oneself, awareness of one’s own weakness.Isaac Deutscher, with whom Serge should be but never is compared, held a similar view (as did Sartre, whose Les Temps modernes published a selection of the Notebooks after the war). Deutscher, though, went further. A generation younger than Serge, he was born in Chrzanó in 1907 to a strongly rabbinical household. He joined the Polish Communist Party around 1927, but was horrified by the ultra-sectarian position on fascism espoused by Stalin and won over by Trotsky’s writings on how it should be combated. After being expelled by the Polish CP he became involved with Polish supporters of the Left Opposition. When Trotsky decided to found a Fourth International both Serge and Deutscher were opposed, feeling the timing was wrong. Serge predicted it would lead to a proliferation of squabbling sects, and the Polish delegation to the Founding Conference outside Paris in 1938 read out a statement by Deutscher arguing that in forming the Fourth International the Trotskyists would be isolated from currents inside the communist parties in their own countries. Deutscher moved to London, where he began to write in flawless English, often compared to Conrad’s. In a country without a strong communist party posing a real political threat, Deutscher was able to get a temporary job at the Economist and later wrote for the Observer – even if Isaiah Berlin made sure he was denied a teaching post at Sussex. Serge didn’t have his luck.

Curiously, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography of Trotsky doesn’t mention The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, which Serge wrote with Natalia Sedova. Of the two men, Deutscher, who died in 1967, was always more aware of the contradictions and weaknesses of Stalinism, while Serge tended to overestimate its hold. It was clear that Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe would even in the medium term weaken the system, inside and outside the Soviet Union. The workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, the Hungarian revolt in 1956, the Polish demonstrations in December that same year and finally the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 marked the end of all hope. Asked when he had decided the system was beyond reform, Solzhenitsyn said: ‘On 21 August 1968.’ He was wrong, but he wasn’t the only one. It was difficult then to imagine Gorbachev, let alone the dismantling of the whole system.

Revolutions elsewhere would never lead to carbon copies of Stalin’s Russia, Deutscher argued, but would accelerate the process of reform in the USSR. Stalin’s 1948 excommunication of Tito, who refused to subordinate the Yugoslav revolution to Moscow’s needs, and Khrushchev’s 1958 breach with Mao, vindicated this analysis. The Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, was followed by a decree ordering the closure of the prison camps. By the time ex-communists took anti-communism as their creed, the Gulag had been gone for almost two decades. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed it was the result of an implosion at the top. The bastard offspring of this process is Putin, in whose muscled and well-oiled figure Father Church embraces and violates Mother Russia. Serge and Deutscher would have had a few things to say about this. 

LRB Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020

Flailing States 

Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America

The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan; strategies deployed by nations that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted after a visit to a hospital treating coronavirus patients: ‘I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.’



Epidemiologists have become the idols of a frightened public and scientific rigour has gained a new status in large parts of the world. But the current regimes in the US and Britain gained power by fomenting hatred of experts and expertise. British ministers, chosen for their devotion to Brexit and loyalty to Johnson, have revealed themselves as dangerous blunderers. Trump, still promoting family, flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.

As a general insurrection erupts against America’s foundational inequities, and a British national identity propped up by fantasies of empire finally splinters, it isn’t enough to lament the ‘authoritarian populism’ of Trump and Johnson, to blame ‘identity politics’ and the ‘intolerant left’, or to claim moral superiority over China, Russia and Iran. The early winners of modern history now seem to be its biggest losers, with their delegitimised political systems, grotesquely distorted economies and shattered social contracts.

Narcissistic intellectual habits, which credit moral virtue and political wisdom to countries such as India because they appear to conform to Anglo-American notions of democracy and capitalism, will have to be abandoned. More attention must be paid to the specific historical experiences and political traditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea – countries once described (and dismissed) as authoritarian and protectionist – and the methods they have used to mitigate the suffering caused both by manmade change and sudden calamity. The idea of strategic state-building, historically alien to Britain and the US, will have to be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.

Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and trace programme, is reinstating its Kurzarbeit (‘short-work’) scheme, which was first used in the early 20th century but proved particularly valuable after the 2008 financial crisis. South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people – a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort. Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus. China managed to curb its spread and has since dispatched medics and medical supplies around the world.

Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. Nevertheless, the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in history still comes as a shock to some. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1986, ‘the most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’

The assumptions of the Anglo-American mainstream have remained unchanged for decades, despite the dramatic rise of nation-states whose political, social and economic structures are marked by what Hamilton called ‘the incitement and patronage of government’. Milton Friedman’s argument that ‘the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests’ became the common sense of our age. Anglo-America amassed unprecedented cultural and ideological power, even as self-inflicted calamities such as Iraq and the financial crisis diminished its geopolitical influence, and inequality together with an eviscerated social infrastructure blighted the lives of its working people. English has been the language of globalisation, helping broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC, as well as periodicals such as the New York Times, the Economist and the Financial Times, to increase their international reach and prestige. A network of institutions, foundations and think tanks, including the Ivy League universities and Oxbridge, have trained the world’s politicians, businessmen, academics and journalists in the Anglo-American ideologies of unfettered markets and minimal government.

Hailing globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George W. Bush managed to create a political and journalistic consensus around the notion that ‘the global expansion of democracy is the ultimate force in rolling back terrorism and tyranny.’ In the New York Times magazine, Niall Ferguson urged Americans to re-establish with ‘military force’ the British empire of ‘free trade’ and ‘balanced budgets’. In a cover story, the Atlantic described torture as a ‘necessary evil’. Andrew Sullivan called for the ‘extermination of the enemy in all its forms – relentlessly, constantly, insistently’. Time, Newsweek and the Spectator, as well as the Murdoch-owned media, fervently promoted fantasies of Anglo-American supremacism. In retrospect, this ideological synergy of bumptious men was a case of catastrophic success, which guaranteed maximal shock and bewilderment in its aftermath. In recent years, civil wars in Iraq and Libya, the financial crisis, Brexit and Trump’s election have made it clear that democracy cannot be implanted by military force; that humanitarian war creates forces such as IS in the ruins of destroyed states; and that while state economic controls can make a ‘communist’ country central to global capitalism, Anglo-American free marketeering results in intolerable inequity.

The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist. They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer.

Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. ‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.

What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.

Buffeted by socio-economic changes and rising inequality, Germany faced early on what Japan and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a matter of life or death. Military and economic rivalry with Britain was a daunting enough prospect for their fledgling state. But, as disaffection increased among the classes uprooted and exploited by industrial capitalism – a political party representing the interests of the working classes emerged in Germany decades before it did in Britain – the fear of socialist revolution also preyed on the minds of German leaders.

They could not set about removing impediments to individual freedom in the way their counterparts in laissez-faire Britain were then doing, nor could they entrust economic affairs to the invisible hand of the market. As the deliberations of the influential Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) between 1872 and 1882 reveal, unfettered economic liberalism was seen as a threat to institutions and to a still fragile national unity. The safest way to defuse the volatile social question, the association decided, was to ensure state-guaranteed protection for citizens exposed to extreme socio-economic tumult and radical insecurity – what Bismarck, seeking to outmanoeuvre his socialist opponents, described as ‘moderate, reasonable state socialism’.

In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal. Little, however, is still known about the global history of this German-devised state – what W.E.B. Du Bois, who was in turn-of-the-century Germany as a student, described as ‘the guardian and leader of the social and industrial interests of the people’. It’s not surprising that the social state receives scant attention in boosterish Anglo-American accounts of the making of the modern world. Milton Friedman claimed that postwar Japan and South Korea were exemplars of open, competitive markets; Francis Fukuyama credited the prewar successes of Germany and Japan to ‘economic liberalism’. It’s also true that the social question did not until recently seem as critical in Anglo-America as in late-developing nations. Britain, the first major imperialist power of the modern era, successfully combined its early industrial and scientific revolution with slave labour and land grabs from Fiji to the Caribbean. Socialism stood little chance in a country where habits of deference to the ruling classes were (and remain) deeply entrenched.

Alexander Hamilton is a rare example of an early American internationalist who saw strong states as playing an essential role in the hard struggles of the future. But Americans, busy forging a nation from the white masters of a slave society, could afford to ignore him. They had the advantage of a constantly expanding frontier at home during the 19th century, by the end of which they had become commercially and militarily powerful, ready and keen to savour territories, resources and markets abroad. Hegel predicted that since the American political community was defined by ‘the preponderance of private interest’, it would only achieve a ‘real state and a real government’ after ‘wealth and poverty become extreme’, compelling an economically exhausted people to seek new forms of governance. Such a modernisation has never been accomplished; as Samuel Huntington once argued, the American republic continues to resemble a Tudor monarchy more closely even than Britain’s constitutional monarchy.

Outdated institutions and ideologies endured partly because collective action by workers never matched the potent appeal of private interests. When inequality grew intolerable and meritocracy began to appear a fraud, the American ruling class answered its social question more ferociously than many tyrants, with mass incarceration – removing many of the long-term victims of slave society from public life. The American state had little authority to intervene in social and economic realms on behalf of ordinary citizens, but at the same time its mandate – to protect the liberty of its citizens from foreign states and non-state actors – turned the US into a military behemoth abroad and expanded the infrastructure of white domination at home. The New Deal was an exceptional instance of a US government recognising that the state can and should be a guardian of the people’s interests; but it arose out of the twin calamities of the First World War and the Great Depression. Struggling to survive them, even extreme individualists were forced to recognise that, as Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘to create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.’

After the Second World War, nearly all Western governments accepted, to varying degrees, that the state was a necessary actor, even if they didn’t all agree that it was the ‘greatest moral institution for the education of mankind’ (in the words of Gustav Schmoller). The leaders of the free world were keen to appear to be working hard to secure social justice as well as prosperity for their citizens; even the most conservative among them seemed to agree with Bismarck that ‘the state cannot exist without a certain socialism.’ Responding to East Germany’s claim that it possessed a superior social security system, Christian Democrats extended the West German system to benefit increasing numbers of people. These were also the decades when the National Health Service was created; when welfare projects like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which promised cash benefits for all families in need, were launched; and when civil rights legislation was introduced with one nervous eye on Soviet propagandists, who tirelessly and irrefutably pointed to the organised degradation of African Americans in the US.

Such small moves towards a social state provoked dismay among ordoliberal dogmatists in Europe, such as Wilhelm Röpke, who accused the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations of endangering the racial unity of the West by pursuing socialistic ideas of equality. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian tracks the circulation of Röpke’s ideas among right-wing Americans aghast at their leaders’ egalitarian rhetoric and welfare programmes.* But libertarian ideologies didn’t return to the mainstream until the 1970s, when ageing Western societies experienced successive crises. In 1970, Milton Friedman could count on an increasingly congenial ideological climate when he argued in the New York Times magazine that businesses had no social responsibility beyond making a profit. He was the public face of an ideological shift which saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for economics education in universities. Partly as a result of their influence, and emboldened by the rhetoric of Reagan and Thatcher, during the 1980s politicians across the ideological spectrum began to dismantle social protections, undermine labour rights and slash taxes on the rich. The process accelerated after the West’s ‘victory’ in the Cold War, when fantasies of Americanising the globe bloomed. ‘I want everyone to become an American,’ Thomas Friedman, consigliere to globalising CEOs and modernising despots, insisted as late as 2008.

Inspired by Thatcher and right-wing US think tanks, Tony Blair pushed state policy and public attitudes in Britain closer to the notion that welfare is a problem rather than the solution. Over the last decade, successive Conservative governments have ruthlessly shredded what was left of the social safety net in the name of budgetary ‘austerity’, hastening Britain’s decline into a flailing – if not failed – state that can’t even secure supplies of gowns and masks for its hospital workers. In the US, welfare was turned into a dirty word by Reagan’s dog-whistles about ‘welfare queens’, and then came under intensive attack by Bill Clinton, America’s ‘first black president’. An approving chorus was provided by the New Republic, once the main organ of American progressivism, as well as the National Review and the New York Times. After the collapse of communism, and the moral challenge it presented, the corralling of African Americans was resumed without fear of international scrutiny; the new weapons for this purpose, honed to deadly effect under Clinton, and fully endorsed by Joe Biden in the Senate, were mass incarceration and a militarised police. As Hillary Clinton, who is currently vending an anti-racist reading list (‘Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a great and thoughtful starting point’), saw it in 1996, the ‘superpredators’ had ‘no conscience, no empathy’ and ‘we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.’ If the shambolic response to Hurricane Katrina established that George W. Bush ‘doesn’t care about black people’, as Kanye West put it, the aftermath of the financial crisis showed that Barack Obama was keen not to be seen as caring too much about black people. The second black president lectured African Americans about individual responsibility while bailing out his future paymasters on Wall Street.

The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 people in the US, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, has now shown, far more explicitly than Katrina did in 2005 or the financial crisis in 2008, that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, Anglo-America’s main ideological export and the mainstay of its moral prestige, has never been what it was cracked up to be. Democracy does not guarantee good government, even in its original heartlands. Neither does the individual choice that citizens of democracies periodically exercise – whether in referendums or elections – confer political wisdom on the chosen. It might even delude them, as Johnson and Trump confirm, into deranged notions of omnipotence. The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, is realised nowhere. The fact of economic inequality, not to mention the compromised character of political representatives, makes it unrealisable. More disturbing still, voters have been steadily deprived, not least by a mendacious or click-baiting fourth estate, of the capacity either to identify or to seek the public interest. Modern democracy, in other words, bears little resemblance to the form of government that went under its name in ancient Greece. And in no place does democracy look more like a zombie than in India, Anglo-America’s most diligent apprentice, where a tremendously popular Hindu supremacist movement diverts attention from grotesque levels of inequality and its own criminal maladroitness by stoking murderous hatred against Muslims.

To​ grow up in India in the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, was to live through the fiascos of both democracy and state-building. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, India’s founding figures were outspoken partisans of social, political and economic equality. And during its early decades, when Martin Luther King, among others, travelled to India to seek inspiration for the civil rights movement, the country seemed a beacon to striving people of colour everywhere. Here was a non-communist nation-state of overwhelmingly poor people, trying to create an egalitarian society and an internationally competitive economy within a political framework – parliamentary elections and separation of powers – explicitly modelled on Anglo-America.

But India never built a well-organised state of the sort that would allow such a country, despoiled by colonialism, to overcome its extreme disadvantages: an underproductive agricultural economy, a weak industrial base, and a poorly fed and mostly illiterate citizenry. In the early decades of independence, government interventions did result in some progress in heavy industry and agriculture. Investment in higher (though not primary) education created generations of superbly skilled upper-caste Indians; many of them can be found today in senior positions at US corporations such as Microsoft and Google, as well as in academia and journalism. But economic growth was slower than in many East Asian countries, despite the fact that India had started off with a broad industrial base and possessed a relatively strong bureaucratic and administrative apparatus.

By the late 1970s, disillusionment with India’s lack of progress was deep and pervasive. A spell of authoritarian rule under Indira Gandhi had resolved nothing, while revealing the spinelessness of the media and judiciary and the repressively law-and-order orientation of the state inherited from British colonialists. The poor were very far from enjoying civil liberties or a chance at prosperity; and many among the upper castes, impatient with the inept rulers thrown up by elections, longed for the country to be run by an efficient autocrat like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. A few envious glances were also directed at South Korea’s president, Park Chung Hee, who had seized power after a military coup in 1961 and during his 18-year rule supervised the transformation of a dirt-poor rural country into a world-beating manufacturing giant with excellent educational standards and massively improved public health.

China’s transformation under Deng Xiaoping from Maoist basket case to global economic powerhouse was particularly galling to many Indians, especially those who had believed in Anglo-American predictions of their country’s inevitable and unstoppable ‘rise’. When Narendra Modi won power in 2014 with the help of India’s richest businessmen, promising to liberate Indian markets from state regulation and boost them into the company of Western superpowers, the ambitious elites seemed to have found their own enlightened despot (albeit that he was suspected of involvement in a pogrom that killed hundreds of Muslims). Modi seemed to promise an India that would fulfil Anglo-American fantasies: an Asian country that combined democracy with free markets and would be a counterweight to authoritarian China. The American Enterprise Institute welcomed him as India’s version of Reagan and Thatcher; Obama claimed that he reflected ‘the dynamism and potential of India’s rise’.

The quick fix of authoritarianism has exacerbated rather than resolved India’s fundamental problems. Effortlessly subverting the media, judiciary and the military, India’s Hindu supremacist rulers have shown themselves to be cold-blooded fanatics, willing to stoke anti-Muslim pogroms, assassinate critics and collectively punish minorities (as in Kashmir, where a lockdown lasting months preceded the pandemic). After six years of Modi’s rule, India is further away than ever from matching the material achievements of China, let alone those of Western countries; and it is being humiliated militarily by China (the Galwan Valley incident last month in which at least twenty Indian troops were killed is just the most recent example). Manufacturing has long been stagnant; and banks are deeply in debt because of the bad loans they have handed out to crony-capitalists. More than 140 million migrant workers have lost jobs during a botched lockdown; and now starvation looms over hundreds of millions of Indians already tormented by malnutrition, poor education and a lack of sanitation.

Not all of India’s unfolding disasters can be blamed on Modi. For a long time, as Amartya Sen has argued, India’s rulers failed to make crucial investments in primary education and public health, and thus didn’t create the ‘human capital’ and infrastructure necessary for the labour-intensive manufacturing revolution which, decades before China’s rise, created the ‘East Asian Tigers’, South Korea and Taiwan. One reason the Covid-19 pandemic threatens carnage in India is that it spends proportionately less than even Nepal and Timor-Leste – 1.3 per cent of its GDP – on healthcare (South Korea, by way of comparison, spends 8.1 per cent) and has a highly privatised health system. The only Indian state with adequate protection from the pandemic is communist-controlled Kerala, whose public health and education systems have long ensured that the state has the highest life expectancy and literacy rate in India.

South Korea started from an equally low base in the 1940s and succeeded in creating both a modern industrialised economy and a society remarkable for its low levels of income, if not gender, inequality. India’s rulers derived legitimacy from elections (and garnered much Western acclaim for these ‘festivals’ of democracy), but its modern state, while becoming more ingeniously coercive than the colonial state it was grafted onto, has never developed the capacity to rescue its hundreds of millions of citizens from poverty and social inequality. Vivek Chibber argues in his comparative study of India and South Korea, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialisation in India (2003), that India’s rulers were unable or unwilling to act against the wishes of the businessmen who campaigned against state-led development. South Korea, on the other hand, demonstrated yet again that for late-developers, state-building is a pre-requisite for nation-building, and that social and economic well-being depends less on how political representatives are chosen and more on how adroitly the state formulates and implements policy. Park, for instance, extended the patronage of government to what are now South Korea’s most prominent chaebol (family-owned) business groups: Hyundai, Daewoo and Samsung. These lessons in social and industrial policy, which Germany began administering in the late 19th century, and which have been most effectively taken to heart by China, were comprehensively lost on the upper-caste rulers of India, whose major preoccupation was the perpetuation of their own power through the ballot box. India today represents the worst of all possible worlds: far-right Hindus deftly manipulate electoral democracy and the public sphere, the state seems better equipped for repression than for welfare, and its economic experiments with deregulation and privatisation have produced numerous oligarchs but no internationally recognised product or enterprise.

South Korea, like India, took political inspiration from its former coloniser. Born and educated under Japanese colonial rule, Park admired and attempted to imitate Japan’s swift emergence as a major industrial power. Like the Japanese, he looked for guidance to Friedrich List, the German economic protectionist, rather than Adam Smith. According to Park, ‘the life of the nation can be developed and grown only through the state.’ As he saw it, the laissez-faire individualism backed by Anglo-American elites encouraged social fragmentation and political strife, making state and nation-building nearly impossible. ‘We are different,’ he argued, ‘from the West that pits the individual against the state.’

Park spoke as the latest of late developers, keen to learn from the experiences of the advanced powers, and to avoid their mistakes. His teachers in Japan, who had copied Germany’s model as diligently as he imitated Japan’s, down to its constitution, also found top-down mobilisation a more effective framework than liberalism for nation and state-building. Unlike Weber’s Germany, Japan was not exactly split apart by economic development. All the same, its leaders were cautious from the start. As Kanai Noburu, an economist who trained in Germany in the 1880s and became a mentor to many Japanese thinkers and leaders, put it: ‘If workers are treated like animals, then after several decades unions and socialism will appear.’

By the early 20th century, Japan’s industrial revolution had rendered especially urgent the social question, or shakai mondai. Discussions of what economic development entailed invariably featured the term bunmei byd (civilisation sickness), a reference to the problems afflicting British and American societies: class divisions, labour strife, destruction of communities, excessive materialism, radical individualism and the decline of the values of social co-operation. In 1908, Japan’s prime minister, Katsura Taro, summed up the speedy self-education of conservative but pragmatic ruling classes in catch-up societies:


The development of machine industry and the intensification of competition widens the gap between rich and poor and creates antagonisms that endanger social order. Judging by Western history, this is an inevitable pattern ... Therefore, it goes without saying that we must rely on education to nurture the people’s values; and we must devise a social policy that will assist their industry, provide them work, help the aged and infirm and, thereby, prevent catastrophe.

Catastrophe came nonetheless, as a result of the pressure to compete with established imperialist powers. Weber had a tough-minded understanding of the unforgiving world that forced a latecomer like Germany to catch up expeditiously with Britain and the US. ‘We cannot pass peace and human happiness on to our descendants,’ he wrote, ‘but the maintenance and up-breeding of our national kind.’

Hitler, who took racist legislation in the US as a model and envied Britain for its ‘capitalist exploitation of 350 million slaves’ in India, frankly underscored the genealogy of German nationalism in British imperialism and US settler colonialism. ‘What India was for England,’ he declared, ‘the Eastern territories will be for us’; their ‘natives’ would be regarded as ‘redskins’. The scramble for territory and resources, started by British slave-owners and colonialists, and the subsequent international race to create the fittest political and economic organism for survival, are what made the first half of the 20th century so uniquely violent (not some fundamental incompatibility between ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘totalitarianism’, as the Cold War narrative had it). Desperately seeking Lebensraum, Germany and Japan clashed with their competitors and eventually capitulated to the greater military might of the Allied powers.

In the postwar era, even when reconstructing their strength as economic powers with the help of American aid, Germany and Japan didn’t abandon their commitment to the social state. The constitution that came into effect in Japan in 1947 emphasised the state’s obligation to provide social security and public healthcare. In 1949, a new constitution enshrined the ‘social state’ in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the adjective ‘social’ retained its import and weight in the ‘social market economy’ introduced by Ludwig Erhard, the minister for economic affairs and Röpke’s disciple. Since the rise of privatisation and deregulation in the 1970s, social protections have been undermined in Germany, Japan and much of East Asia, including China. But even in their enfeebled form, they remain superior to the skeletal welfare states of Britain and the US.

While​ the peddlers of free markets, democracy, the end of history, neo-imperialism and the flat earth were getting high on their own supply, China emerged as the most formidable exponent of concerted state power so far seen. Just as American wages began to stagnate in the 1970s, the living conditions of a large percentage of the Chinese population began to improve dramatically: the biggest transformation of this kind in history. This extraordinary economic expansion has been accompanied by unparalleled damage to the environment and cruel limitations on individual liberty, especially in Hong Kong and the minority regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. China also needs to confront mounting national debt and the problems associated with an ageing population. Still, scepticism about its material progress, insistence that regime change and American-style democracy are inevitable, or that the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, do nothing to improve the prospects of citizens in the countries that are so proud of being democracies.

Their sanctimony can’t disguise the fact that China, single-mindedly pursuing modernisation under a technocratic elite, has verified Hamilton’s belief that only a strong, proactive state can protect its citizens from the maelstrom of violent and unavoidable change: ‘Nothing but a well-proportioned exertion of the resources of the whole, under the direction of a Common Council, with power sufficient to give efficacy to their resolutions, can preserve us from being a conquered people now, or can make us a happy people hereafter.’ China has been more coldly pragmatic, too, than its Western critics. After all, a ruling party that calls itself ‘communist’ chose to abandon its foundational ideology and adapt itself to a market economy, just as the US, seeking to build a new world order, was failing to implant democracy by persuasion or military force in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Arab world, succeeding only in facilitating brutal anarchy or despotism in almost every country it sought to remake in its image. More recently, and damagingly, a feckless global experiment in economic hyper-liberalism led by Anglo-America’s political class and mainstream intelligentsia has helped empower neo-fascist movements and personalities in both countries.

China may or may not address its democratic deficit, as South Korea and Taiwan have both done. Its chillingly resourceful suppression of dissent in Hong Kong and Xinjiang renews the warning from the histories of Germany and Japan: that the modern state’s biopower can enable monstrous crimes. But there’s no getting around the desolate position that the great paragons of democracy find themselves in today. Neither Britain nor America seems capable of dealing with the critical challenges to collective security and welfare thrown up by the coronavirus. No less crushing is the exposure, as Rhodes finally falls, of the fact that the power and prestige of Anglo-America originated in grotesque atrocities and, as William James wrote in 1897, that ‘a land of freedom, boastfully so called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it’ was always ‘a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction’.

The moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision. At the very least, it must incorporate the experiences of late-developing nations: their fraught and often tragic quests for meaningful sovereignty, their contemptuously thwarted ideas for an egalitarian world order, and the redemptive visions of social movements, from the Greens in Germany to Dalits in India. The recent explosion of political demagoguery, after years of endless and futile wars, should have been an occasion to interrogate the narratives of British and American narcissism. Trump and Brexit offered an opportunity to ‘break democracy’s spell’ on the Anglo-American mind – something the political theorist John Dunn has been arguing for since the late 1970s, long before Anglo-American triumphalism assumed inflexible forms. Those hypnotised by the word, Dunn argued, had become oblivious to the fact that the political and economic arrangements they preferred, and which they described as ‘democracy’, could neither continue indefinitely nor handle ‘the immediate challenges of collective life within and between individual countries effectively even in the present’.

Instead, the elevation of tub-thumpers to high office in London and Washington led to a proliferation of self-pitying and self-flattering accounts, describing the way the long march of ‘liberal democracy’ had been disrupted by uncouth ‘populists’, ‘identity liberals’, ‘social-justice warriors’ and even, as Anne Applebaum claimed in a cover article in the Atlantic, by senior Republicans, who had abandoned their ‘ideals’ and ‘principles’. Mark Lilla’s preposterous argument, first aired in the New York Times, that the ‘Mau-Mau tactics’ of Black Lives Matter and Hillary Clinton’s radical ‘rhetoric of diversity’ helped elect Trump, was reverently amplified in the Financial Times and the Guardian. Mainstream periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic quickly mobilised against a resurgent left by promoting intellectual grifters and stentorian culture warriors while doubling down on their default pro-establishment positions. ‘The New York Times is in favour of capitalism,’ James Bennet, the newspaper’s editorial page director, told his colleagues, because it is the ‘greatest anti-poverty programme and engine of progress that we’ve seen’. Bennet, who had given space to articles that denied climate change, promoted eugenics and recommended apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, was forced to resign last month over an op-ed calling for military force to be used against anti-racist protesters. Nevertheless, Samantha Power’s recent claims in the NYT that ‘the United States leads no matter what it does’ and ‘nations still look to us in times of crisis’ confirm that the factotums and publicists of the ancien régime remain persistent, yearning for a Restoration under a Biden administration.

However, after the most radical upheaval of our times, even the bleakest account of the German-invented social state seems a more useful guide to the world to come than moist-eyed histories of Anglo-America’s engines of universal progress. Screeching ideological U-turns have recently taken place in both countries. Adopting a German-style wage-subsidy scheme, and channelling FDR rather than Churchill, Boris Johnson now claims that ‘there is such a thing as society’ and promises a ‘New Deal’ for Britain. Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto. In anticipation of his victory in November, the Democratic Party belatedly plans to forge a minimal social state in the US through robust worker-protection laws, expanded government-backed health insurance, if not single-payer healthcare, and colossal investment in public-health jobs and childcare programmes. Businesses pledge greater representation for minorities; and book and magazine publishers seek out testimonies of minorities’ suffering while purging unreconstructed colleagues.

Such tardy wokeness, unaccompanied by major economic and cultural shifts, invites scepticism – black lives, after all, have increasingly mattered to corporate balance sheets. The removal of memorials to slave-traders is likely only to deepen the culture wars if it is not accompanied by an extensive rewriting of the Anglo-American history and economics curriculum. Certainly, the new-fangled welfarism of Britain and the US will remain precarious without a full reckoning with the slavery, imperialism and racial capitalism that made some people in Britain and America uniquely wealthy and powerful, and plunged the great majority of the world’s population into a brutal struggle against scarcity and indignity.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin outlined the necessity of such a moral and intellectual revolution in the starkest terms, arguing that ‘in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves,’ to ‘discard nearly all the assumptions’ used to ‘justify’ their ‘crimes’. The fire Baldwin imagined in 1962 is now raging across the US, and is being met with frantic appeals to white survivalism. ‘You must dominate,’ Trump told state governors on 1 June, threatening to unleash ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’ on his political enemies. Understandably, people exalted for so long by the luck of birth, class and nation will find it difficult, even impossible, to discard their assumptions about themselves and the world. But success in this harsh self-education is imperative if the prime movers of modern civilisation are to prevent themselves from sliding helplessly into the abyss of history.

Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire is published this summer.

BREATHE 
Yes, Activists Are Serious About Defunding the Police

By Bridget Read@bridgetgillard

Photo: Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

On Tuesday, as the country enters the second month of sustained nationwide protests against police brutality, a collection of organizations under the Movement for Black Lives umbrella introduced a sweeping bill to radically transform the criminal-justice system. The BREATHE Act, as it’s named, calls for a “time-bound plan” to close all federal prisons and immigration detention centers. It would also abolish ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration, ban police departments from using surveillance and military-grade weapons, and reallocate funds from policing and incarceration to social-welfare, health-care, education, and environmental programs. Those are just a few of its components.

Though the BREATHE Act would undoubtedly face huge obstacles if introduced in Congress, organizers say its boldness is their strategy: They’re capitalizing on unprecedented momentum from protests and a discernible shift in public opinion to push real material change at the level of the federal government. “We crafted this bill to be big,” Gina Clayton Johnson, one of its creators and the executive director of Essie Justice Group, said during a livestreamed announcement event, “because we know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.” The policy-makers view it as a modern-day Civil Rights Act, one that not only touches on the horrifying plague of murders of Black men and women by police officers but also holistically tackles all the elements of our broken social-welfare systems that inform it. It is a piece of legislation that, even if pie-in-the-sky, lays out a detailed, thoughtful prescription of ideas as they would be realistically implemented that have long been deemed impossible.

Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley say they support the bill, though no member of Congress has officially said they will introduce the BREATHE Act yet. Here’s what you should know:
Who helped create the BREATHE Act?

The Movement for Black Lives, a group of more than 150 organizations founded in 2014, introduced the bill, the culmination of a project by its policy table. M4BL describes itself as abolitionist rather than reformist in practice; its website says that “prisons, police and all other institutions that inflict violence on Black people must be abolished and replaced by institutions that value and affirm the flourishing of Black lives.”
What are the BREATHE Act’s most significant proposals?

No text of the actual bill has yet been released, but the summary of the BREATHE Act lays out demands to create a “time-bound plan” to totally dismantle federal policing and incarceration and to divest funds from those entities on the state level. So in addition to far-reaching, transformative demands on the federal level — the aforementioned plans to close all federal prisons, as well as youth detention and border detention centers, to eliminate federal policing agencies like ICE and to end the harshest policies like mandatory minimum sentencing and civil-asset forfeiture — the bill would abolish programs like the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which allows local law enforcement to obtain excess military equipment from the government. It would have the government take back equipment that was previously purchased through a Neighborhood Demilitarization Program.

The rest of the BREATHE Act is dedicated to reallocating funds saved from closed prisons and a greatly shrunken police force to community and social programs — to more equitable public housing, Medicaid expansion, and pilot programs for universal basic income and universal child care, paid for in part through federal grants. It would pass H.R.40, which establishes a congressional committee to study how the government might give reparations to the descendants of enslaved people. And it would grant all formerly incarcerated people the right to vote in federal elections, with currently incarcerated and undocumented people getting the right to vote in local and state jurisdictions.
Can these things really happen?

The BREATHE Act would encounter gargantuan resistance in Congress if it were to be introduced in full: No Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has claimed to support calls to defund the police. But organizers are counting on a dramatic shift in public opinion, one they say “has changed the conditions of what is possible,” as author Jessica Byrd puts it. They are aiming for what they want, rather than what they think they can get. It is remarkable even to see concepts like the expunging of juvenile records and low-level drug offenses and the banning of life sentences presented as concrete policy proposals instead of wishful thinking. The BREATHE Act is a rebuke to those critics who would say “defunding the police” is a protest chant and not a set of real policy goals.

University of Michigan professor Heather Ann Thompson told the Associated Press that the BREATHE Act’s elements “only look radical if we really ignore the fact that there has been tremendous pressure to meaningfully reform this criminal-justice system. Every radical piece of legislation that we’ve ever passed in this country, it has passed on the heels of the kinds of grassroots protests that we saw on the streets. The will of the people indicates that if they just keep putting a Band-Aid on it, these protests are not going to go away.”

Marxist mobs sweep into cities, call for defunding of police, tear down statues and create havoc

ANOTHER RAVING LOONY HEADLINE FROM THE AMERICAN RIGHT WING MEDIA

Demonstrators holds signs during a protest to demand the defunding of the Los Angeles school district police outside of the school board headquarters Tuesday, June 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

By Tammy Bruce - - Wednesday, July 8, 2020

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

We were told this was a “movement” to make Black lives matter. We were told this was a movement to reform and improve the police. We were told Black Americans were being targeted and killed indiscriminately and that had to stop. After George Floyd’s death, we were told many things with which we agreed.

But instead of a movement to make Black lives matter, anarchist Antifa thugs and the Democratic Party-associated Marxist Black Lives Matter swooped in — exploiting Black lives, the continuing tragedy of the inner-city and the goodwill and unity of the American people.

The organized political Marxists, with the apparent wink and nod from the Democrats running various American cities, has erased any positive movement and instead has replaced “reform the police” with “defund the police.” Black lives mattering was replaced with Black Americans murdered at a record pace. Instead of lifting people up, we watch as anarchy and mob violence takes hold and destroys lives in some of our most important and historic cities.

 EVEN MORE LOONY RIGHT OPINION/CONSPIRACY THEORIES POSING AS NEWSTOP STORIESGeorgia kicks off chilling door-to-door COVID-19 blood collectionsBlack Lives Matter AWOL as violence claims hundreds of Black victimsRobert De Niro's restaurant chain Nobu took 14 PPP loans

The moment mass hysteria took hold of our ruling class, the panicked desire to not be called “racist” by Marxist bullies destroyed any hope for actual reform and progress not just of policing tactics, but also of a law enforcement system that caters to the rich while condemning the disenfranchised.

The “movement” instead became a parade of White people, individually and in corporations, jockeying to prove who was the most woke by confessing to racist thoughts or actions.

Americans were repulsed by embarrassing videos of celebrities begging for forgiveness and pledging to “learn” about how they could do better. Sports teams began placating the mob by embracing kneeling during the national MAA. A coach, who was shamed for wearing a T-shirt that offended our new mob bosses, apologized and publicly begged for forgiveness.

Movie, book and pancake syrup makers were determined to get in on the Woke Olympics. Statues continue to come down — including one of an elk in Portland. One would guess the poor creature had not been fast enough with his own racism mea culpa on behalf of his four-legged brethren. So down, down came the elk!

WHITE ETHNIC MARXIST MOB

AKA THE WHITE WORKING CLASS 

The law that could make climate change illegal

One of the most robust laws on climate change yet has been created in Denmark. Can legislation really make failing to act on climate change illegal?



By Jocelyn Timperley 7th July 2020

Imagine this: it’s 2030 and a country has just missed its target for cutting carbon emissions, that was set back in 2020. People are frustrated, but several governments have come and gone since the goal was set. “Don’t blame us,” the current government says. “We didn’t take the decisions that led us here.”

The short-term cycles of government can be a real problem for climate change. Even if climate goals are laid down in law, there can often be few concrete measures to stop a succession of governments from taking decisions that collectively end up with them being missed.

But a new and ambitious climate law recently passed in Denmark tries to find a way around this problem, and some of the other common pitfalls of climate laws. It makes Denmark one of a small number of countries beginning to provide new blueprints of how government can genuinely tackle climate change. Its law could turn out to be one of the closest things yet to a law that would make climate change – or at least the lack of effort to stop it – genuinely illegal.

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In January 2019, a petition was launched for a climate law that would bring Denmark in line with the Paris Agreement. After one week, it had been signed by more than 50,000 people – around 1% of Denmark’s population.

The demands of the petition failed to gain overall parliamentary support at the time, but became part of a growing climate movement that swept Denmark last year, along with much of the world. By the time Denmark’s election arrived in June, climate change had become a top election issue.

“The parties kind of overbid each other in their climate ambitions in order to win the election,” says Birgitte Qvist-Sørensen, general secretary of DanChurchAid, one of a group of NGOs behind the petition.




Theoretically, Denmark's new law means the government could lose its majority if it fails to meet its climate targets (Credit: Getty Images)


Once in office, Denmark’s new government, a coalition of left-wing parties led by the Social Democrats, began work on an ambitious climate law, which came into force in June. It is one of the strongest laws of its kind in the world, because it avoids five big pitfalls of climate laws elsewhere.

1. An enduring solution

How can a climate law avoid the scenario of a country setting a goal 10 or 20 years into the future but failing to actually meet it?

Policies to cut emissions are needed years ahead of time to meet climate goals. “It’s about more than just setting a target,” says Tessa Khan, a climate lawyer with Dutch environmental law charity Urgenda. “It's also about making sure that governments are taking the measures in the interim that are necessary to reach that target, and to make that a legally binding process.”


If you’re not on track, the parliament can say, ‘Well, sorry, you’re not on track so you don’t get a majority.’ In theory, that will lead to a government having to step down – Dan Jørgensen


The UK government, for example, has for years neglected the strong policies needed to set it on course to meet its climate targets in the next 12 years. “What we have [in the UK] is a case where the government can set a budget, come up with a plan which isn’t good enough, and then ignore that plan and not need to update it,” says Jonathan Church, a lawyer with the activist legal charity ClientEarth. “Actually, you need the legal weight of whatever law it is to be focused on when those actions are taken.”

The Danish law has several safeguards to this end. Every year, the government will need to find a majority parliamentary approval of its global and national climate strategies. “The government will be held to account every year by the parliament,” says Dan Jørgensen, Denmark’s climate and energy minister. “If you’re not on track, the parliament can say, ‘Well, sorry, you’re not on track so you don’t get a majority.’ In theory, that will lead to a government having to step down.”

Climate change rose quickly up the political agenda in Denmark in 2019, and an ambitious climate law followed in 2020 (Credit: Getty Images)

Of course, if there were a drastic change to the parliamentary make up, this cross-party consensus system could fail. “Technically it's a risk, but in reality [for Denmark], no,” says Qvist-Sørensen, noting that there are so many parties in the parliament that even a big change to one would leave a majority in favour of action.

But what happens when a new government comes in – will it be held to the same standard?

As governments come and go, laws often can too. Climate ambitions by one government can be at risk if a future government does not support them – as seen in the US when President Donald Trump entered the White House and reversed many of his predecessor’s environmental initiatives.

Denmark has tried to minimise this risk by negotiating cross-party support of its climate law. Eight of the 10 parties in the Danish parliament – who together make up around 95% of seats – ultimately voted for the law (members from two small parties voted against it).

“Even if we run into a financial crisis again, even if political parties change and climate won’t be as high on the agenda as it is right now, the law we’ve made now makes sure that the progress on fighting climate change will not stop,” said Jørgensen.

This cross-party support also helps to provide the market certainty needed for companies to invest in low-carbon technologies. “If the markets are to react they need to be sure it’s not just a good idea that’s in fashion right now,” said Jørgensen. “They need to be sure it will last.”

2. Fair share

Another key difference in Denmark’s new law is its evidence-based approach to what share of the global emissions cuts it is responsible for.

Global emissions will need to halve in the next 10 years to keep the world on track to limit temperature rise to 1.5C – a key aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement, which nearly all countries have signed up to. The goals behind climate laws claiming to be in line with the Paris Agreement must therefore be based on the science of what needs to be done, not what is deemed “possible” to do given current technologies.

Developing nations have historically contributed fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which is one factor considered when calculating each country's "fair share" (Credit: Getty Images)

Calculating the “fair share” of emissions reductions needed from each country is complex and varies depending on the method used for divvying out responsibility. Countries have acknowledged, though, that rich nations with more historic emissions should be required to cut their emissions faster than poorer countries who have emitted less. (Read more about who is really to blame for climate change.)

Countries with credible climate plans therefore need to make a genuine attempt to calculate their fair share. This is what Denmark has done, finding that it should reduce emissions 70% by 2030, based on 1990 levels. This legally binding science-based target is the backbone of its new law.

So far Denmark has reached just a 35% drop in emissions, so it has its work cut out over the next 10 years, including immediate action to reduce emissions now and support to development the tools needed to achieve deeper emissions reductions towards the end of the 2020s.

This means the new law is different in committing Denmark to stretching beyond its current capabilities. “With all the knowledge and technology we have today, no matter what we do, we cannot reduce [emissions by] 70% in 10 years,” says Qvist-Sørensen. “Here they’ve set a target that means that we don’t have all the answers yet.”

Denmark’s new law also aims for “net-zero” emissions by 2050, although its “fair share” to reach this target would actually be closer to a 2040 deadline, says John Nordbo, senior advocacy adviser on climate at humanitarian aid non-profit Care Denmark.

This view is shared by other Danish NGOs, but it is more important to focus on a target of 2030 says Qvist-Sørensen, as that goal will have more influence on the decisions being made now. “Hopefully politicians will scale up the ambition before this decade is over, and revise the year for climate neutrality,” she says.

3. Net zero

Global emissions will need to reach “net zero” around mid-century to stay on track for 1.5C, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Any greenhouse gas emissions still occurring in 2050 will need to be balanced out with the same amount of emissions removal from the atmosphere.

This concept of net zero emissions may have its challenges, but a vision for long term emissions cuts will always be an essential part of any credible climate target. A flood of new “net-zero” climate goals have been set in recent years, including by the UK, France, Sweden, New Zealand, the EU at large and states within the US including California and New York. Suriname and Bhutan have already achieved net-zero emissions.

Other countries have even earlier targets than Denmark’s goal for net zero by 2050. Norway, for instance, plans to become “climate neutral” by 2030. The catch? This target is not enshrined in law, and Norway plans to meet it by buying emissions “offsets” from other countries. Norway’s domestic emissions are actually higher today than they were 30 years ago.



Some countries, such as Bhutan, are already at net-zero emissions – or have gone past that goal to carbon-negative (Credit: Getty Images)


This is an important caveat to any “net zero” climate target. Those who support using offsets say they allow emissions to be cut in the cheapest possible way, but others argue they unfairly allow rich countries to buy their way out of the climate problem, and that it is hard to guarantee offsets are permanent – newly grown trees can be cut down again at some point, after all – or would not have happened anyway.

So while the date of Denmark’s net zero target isn’t as ambitious as it could be, its promise to achieve all emissions cuts within its own borders helps to give it credibility. “We say that if all countries just bought credits, then we wouldn’t have the development that we need,” says Jørgensen. “We need technological advances. We need a system where rich countries can’t just buy their way out.”

Other countries have adopted a mixed approach to offsetting in other countries: Sweden, with a net-zero target for 2045, has said at least 85% of cuts will be within its own borders, but other measures can be used for the remaining 15%.

4. In it together

Climate change is a global problem – if it is not tackled everywhere, it will affect everyone. The modern world is also incredibly intertwined: products – and resultant emissions – made in one place are actually consumed in another, while sharing green technologies across borders can also help other countries reduce their emissions.

Many arguegovernments need to do more than cutting emissions strictly within their borders. “It’s of course quite arbitrary to only hold states and governments accountable for the emissions that their territory produces,” says Khan. “I think it’s really important to make sure that those aspects of greenhouse gas emissions aren’t omitted from any climate change law, and that countries are really politically honest about their full responsibility for the problem.”

Many countries skirt around this issue in their climate laws, but Denmark’s new law has a commitment to support other countries in cutting their emissions. It requires climate change to be integrated into foreign development aid and trade policy, and for the climate impacts of Danish imports and consumption to be considered.

“This means: what kind of climate funding do we give? How much money do we give to whom? Which bilateral co-operations have we got?” says Jørgensen. “We also acknowledge that okay, well, even if we reduce 70%, we are also a country that, on the negative side, imports a lot of goods from other countries that creates pollution, CO2 emissions. It’s a way of trying to institutionalise a part of a climate policy that’s difficult to set targets for.”



As well as contributing less greenhouse gas emissions, many developing nations, such as Bangladesh, are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change (Credit: Getty Images)


The details of exactly how this international dimension will work are now being negotiated in parliament. However, so far the law does not fully address the global pledge by rich countries to provide $100bn (£80bn) per year in climate finance to poorer countries, says Nordbo. The fair share of this for Denmark would be around five billion Danish Krone per year, he adds – around $700m (£560m). “The law doesn’t say anything about climate assistance at this level,” he says.

5. Green lens

Denmark’s law also has a safeguard to make sure positive climate efforts in one part of its government aren’t undermined by those in another.

Governments are notoriously bad at “green-checking” their decisions. Often some departments support investment in fossil fuels or road building even while others are pushing clean energy and transport. The UK government, for example, has had a climate change law in place since 2008, but has been criticised for not considering environmental impacts of its spending decisions and for funding fossil fuels abroad.

As climate change moves up the political agenda, an all-hands-on-deck approach is increasingly being prioritised. New Zealand’s government, for instance, said last year that all its major decisions will now be made through a climate change lens.

Denmark’s law likewise aims to ensure all policies support green sustainable development. It establishes a standing committee on “green transformation” to screen the sustainability of all policies, says Jørgensen. “We see this as a transformation of the Danish society that’s so big that it’s not just my ministry, it’s all ministries, including the foreign affairs ministry,” he adds. “They are also responsible for the global strategy that needs to be put forward every year.”

Denmark is also making efforts to include businesses and the public in its plans. A “public climate council” of 99 people will be invited to discuss potential climate plans. Thirteen “climate partnerships”, each led by a different sector, were tasked with coming up with solutions to reduce emissions in their industry. “So actually, [the government] have put the private sector to the test, but are also saying on the other hand that the private sector really wants to be put to the test,” says Qvist-Sørensen.

The partnerships ask each sector how they can contribute, “while also reminding them, a Social Democratic government is not afraid of using the taxation-toolbox”, tweeted Magnus Hornø Gottlieb, an advisor at Danish multinational power company Ørsted. The sectors, ranging from agriculture to aviation, recently gave their recommendations to the government. “Some of them are quite interesting, I must say,” says Qvist-Sørensen.

When laws fall short

Climate laws are becoming an increasingly common tool for countries to tackle climate change. But what if governments fail to create them in the first place? In this case, courts are proving to be a powerful mechanism to force governments to take action.

In one especially noteworthy ruling in 2015, a court in the Hague ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions by at least 25% within five years. The case, brought by Urgenda, was based on the legal obligations of the government to exercise a duty of care to Dutch citizens.



A number of climate lawsuits against governments have already been successful, such as Urgenda's landmark 2015 ruling, which was led by Roger Cox (Credit: Getty Images)


This was the first time a court had ordered a government to reduce its economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by an absolute minimum amount, says Khan, who joined Urgenda in 2016.

Since 2015, the number of climate litigation cases has skyrocketed. In March, a UK court of appeal said plans to expand Heathrow Airport were unlawful because they failed to take the Paris Agreement into account. Climate youth lawsuits have been launched in the US, Canada, Columbia and South Korea for violations of their constitutional rights – and several have won.

Denmark itself also has a movement trying to get climate change into its constitution, says Qvist-Sørensen, which has only been changed twice in the past 100 years. This could open up the door for a parallel process to hold it to account alongside its climate law.

What the Urgenda case proved, says Khan, is that the impacts of climate change, whether already here or forecast to arrive, are illegal because governments have an obligation to protect their residents from harm to their livelihoods, health and housing.

So could climate change ever be made illegal? Protections could certainly always be strengthened, but in many ways we already have the commitments and tools needed to hold governments accountable.

As Khan puts it: “There are already a lot of laws that we could be using to address the climate crisis, that we just aren’t.”
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Former Healthcare executive: Medicare for All could have helped the coronavirus outbreak in the US
7/7/2020
Wendell Potter, president of Medicare for All NOW!, says that universal health care under a single-payer system could have helped the U.S. combat the coronavirus pandemic.

“A large part is because these countries have systems in which there are no barriers to care, there are no financial barriers, people are covered universally in those countries,” Potter said on Hill TV’s “Rising” Tuesday.

 https://thehill.com/node/481240

“In this country we have a system in which there is great discrimination in communities of color. Inordinately people of color in this country are uninsured, and those who have insurance are fearful of going to the doctor or going to the hospital and being hit with a big out-of-pocket expense."

Potter, a former health executive, said that the idea that nations such as Canada with socialized health systems ration care ”is just a myth that regrettably I and my former colleagues used to spread about the Canadian health care system.”

“In fact, at my old job I used to spread a lot of misinformation about the Canadian health care system,” he said. “They actually ration care less in Canada than we do. In fact, we ration care in this country on the ability to pay and that’s part of the reason why our experience with the pandemic is so much worse.”