WHY DO THE NATIONS SO FURIOUSLY RAGE TOGETHER?

The past year, heck, the past few years of the decade about to turn, have been years of rebellion against existing orders.  That brings out the Serious Thinkers, attempting to find Serious (and sometimes predictable) causes.  The Nation's Ben Ehrenreich doesn't quite say, the final coming of the collapse of late capitalism, but in characterizing events as a "global rebellion against neoliberalism," it's clear what outcome he would prefer.

Something is happening here. But what? And why now? In the last 12 weeks, protests have spanned five continents—most of the planet—from wealthy London and Hong Kong to hungry Tegucigalpa and Khartoum. They are so geographically disparate and apparently heterogeneous in cause and composition that I have not yet seen any serious attempt to view them as a unified phenomenon.

But of course, there is.

All of the countries recently experiencing popular revolts—and most of the rest of the planet—have for decades been ruled by a single economic model, in which the “growth” celebrated by the pedigreed few means immiseration for the many, and capital streams into American and European accounts as reliably as sewage flows downhill.

I'm not sure whether it's "immiseration" for many, or some formerly-favored people, industrial workers in the Western industrialized countries, losing income relative to formerly desperate people elsewhere, and I'm not sure how to put the freedom rallies in Hong Kong into this box: and the ongoing impeachment of Our President might be something done at the urging of the left wing of the Democrat caucus, and yet there are many members of the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment, including more than a few Republican-identifying individuals who might be going along secretly, who would not object to conviction and removal.

A John Fund reminiscence of the emergent collapse of the Warsaw Pact from thirty years ago is relevant.

I asked [some residents of East Berlin] what they wanted to be when they grew up. One said a beautician, one said a nurse, and one said a teacher. But the oldest and wisest, whose name was Monika, looked up at me and said very slowly: “It doesn’t matter what we become when we grow up. They will always treat us like children.”

That sentence really defined Communism in its waning years. People were rarely taken away to a political prison. Instead, there was an insufferable and widespread paternalism. It weighed down people’s spirits and prevented them from becoming what was the best within them.

We parted almost tearfully, exchanging addresses so we could swap postcards at Christmas. She wrote that her application for university studies had been rejected because of her views.

The cancel culture of today's vanguard works the same way.  Mr Fund concludes that what happened in East Berlin is relevant to what's going on in Hong Kong.

What we might be seeing is the first manifestation of what J. H. Kunstler calls the "long emergency."  It's no longer possible, Joel Kotkin suggests, for the governing classes to keep staples cheap.

Whether in Europe, East Asia or the Americas, this new middle-class rebellion may be seen as what one Marxist publication called “a strike against the rising cost of living.”

Although the leftists identify this more with protests against things like subway fare hikes, in the latest uprising the key has been those things, notably energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable.

In virtually every high-income country, and increasingly some developing ones as well, the middle class, as a recent OECD report states, is looking “increasingly like a boat in rocky waters.” Overall, particularly in the West and nations like Japan, this decline has been accelerating for three decades. In the United States, among children born in 1940, about 90 percent grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project; that dropped to only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s.

There’s a clear a loss of confidence in the future among the middle orders, and most particularly their heirs. Three-quarters of American adults today predict their children will not grow up to be better off than they are, suggests Pew. These sentiments about the new generation are even worse in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany. In Japan, a remarkable three-quarters of those polled believed things would be worse for the next generation.

Markets reallocate resources, and everybody now understands how to make consumer goods cheaply, which isn't going to turn out well for the less-credentialed residents of the rich countries. In addition, the bid-rent curves in the big cities, worldwide, appear to be getting steeper. (That's something Mr Kotkin grasps, although it's not the easiest thing to explain in an essay for a general audience).

In all these places global capital — much of it from China itself — has boosted prices beyond what most middle-income families can afford. In each homeownership is now increasingly out of reach, particularly for the young. Although some of this reflects market forces and capital flows, much of the price rise, particularly in California, parts of the Northeast, Britain and Canada reflect urban containment regulatory policies that restrict housing supply, particularly on the periphery, where land costs tend to be cheaper.

Recently these policies have been propelled by largely flawed notions that increasingly high density would make housing cheaper and produce lower GHG emissions. Actually, the densest places with the strongest regulation are almost always those with the highest levels of unaffordability. Yet it is in the energy arena where “green policies” have solicited the greatest push-back in a large number of countries.

Meanwhile, Chris Hedges has no confidence in any sort of vanguard, including the flailing current meritocratic elite.

This spirit of meanness corrupts the far right and the far left. It defines the Christian fascists and the alt-right as it defines many in antifa and the black bloc, although unlike their fascist opponents the far left in the United States is a marginal, poorly organized, ideologically bankrupt and ineffectual political force. As societies polarize, the attempts by reformers and moderates such as Sanders and Warren to halt the disorder, defuse the mounting hatreds and antagonisms that are increasingly expressed through violence and salvage democratic norms prove fruitless. The oligarchs do not respond to their appeals and eventually the disenfranchised lose patience with the impotence of the moderates.

He and Mr Kotkin are in accord on one point, though: the pitchforks and tumbrils might be next. "All societies are plagued by social inequality, but when those on the bottom and in the middle of the social pyramid lose their voice and agency, when the society exists only to serve the greed of the rich, when income inequality reaches the levels it has reached in the United States, the social fabric is torn apart and the society destroys itself."

A Bookworm Room post makes a similar point.

People fighting back against political and cultural leaders who have become an international class bound by ties, not to their own countries, but to other world leaders. The transnational elites posture for their fellow transnationals and enacts policies that enrich only themselves. The one thing they’re not doing is taking care of the people in their charge.

A Fifth Wave essay raises the possibility that attempting to understand the discontent using any of the conventional paradigms (Marxian, populism, any of the ruling models of governance) might be futile.

While few are calling for revolution and absolutely no one is proposing alternatives to representative government, the public’s alienation clearly runs deeper than mere hostility to the elites.  There is, I believe, a powerful if inchoate craving for structural change.

This would be a good time to bring up the pessimistic hypothesis.  It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system:  the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration.  Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality.  A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart.  This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.

For systems that are dynamic and complex, like human societies, outcomes are a lot more mysterious.  A failure cascade of revolts (the hypothesis) will knock the institutions of modern government ever further from equilibrium, until the entire structure topples into what Alicia Juarrero calls “phase change”:  a “qualitative reconfiguration of the constraints” that gave the failed system its peculiar character.  In plain language, the old regime is overthrown – but at this stage randomness takes charge, and what emerges on the far side is, in principle, impossible to predict.

Put another way, the ending of a saecular order is emergent, and it ought come as no surprise that the outlines of what takes its place will be emergent as well: and thus have rigidities not robust to future challenges.

That might give pause, particularly to the vanguardists of a Marxian bent, as much of the discontent Mr Ehrenreich sees as with "neoliberalism" is really with the soft totalitarianism of expertise.  Richard Ebeling explains at length.

The ideological denominations under the general collectivist calling include old-fashioned Marxists, reborn democratic socialists, paternalist progressives, traditional and neo-nationalists, “Make America Great Again” mercantilists, race-conscious tribalists, and Earth-worshiping environmentalists who seem to value all living things except man.

Combined, these collectivist charges add up to a worrisome and potentially dangerous threat to what has been generally understood as the free society, over especially the last three hundred years or so. All these collectivists view themselves in their own different ways as “progressives,” with government plans to make the world a better place for all.

Perhaps, in the failure cascade, all that is holy in the above list will be profaned; so, too, might the Enlightenment notions of perfect liberty.

The Bookworm Room post goes there.

Across the world, as weary, beaten-down people look at a ruling class that sees them as despicable, dirty deplorables, these ordinary people, these normals, need to rise up and say, “It’s time for them to go.”

And here’s a word of warning to the ruling class: You managed to keep a lid on things for seven decades after WWII. The people’s discontent, though, is boiling. Bad things happen when the pressure from that boiling finally blows off that tightly pressed lid. I suggest that the Western world’s ruling class, as well as the ruling class in China and the Middle East, gracefully backs away from the levers of power before its members get their greedy, smug little hands blown off of those same levers.

Be assured that I’m not advocating a bullet-style revolution. I prefer my revolutions at the ballot box. But when a people become too discontent, the ballot box is suddenly no longer an option.

What Reason columnist Steve Chapman sees as building in Hong Kong might be the worst case scenario more generally.

The brave idealism of the people of Hong Kong is enough to stir the heart of anyone who cherishes freedom. But the harsh reality is that they are unlikely to get more of what they demand. The movement could end because they accept this modest victory and go back to their normal lives. Or it could end in tears and blood.

The next few years promise to be ... challenging.