Why does it always swing on me?

[imomus]

Within the next ten days, the world's second and third richest nations will hold general elections. Japan goes to the polls this Sunday, September 11th, and Germany on the 18th. I can tell you the results already. In Japan, Junichiro Koizumi will win and in Germany Angela Merkel will win. I can tell you this not because I have a crystal ball, or because I'm in tune with the feelings of the citizens of Japan and Germany, or because these people are ahead in the polls. No, I know because this always happens to me. I always arrive in a country with a leftish government, and see a swing to a rightish government.

Now, it may be true that the difference between the "leftish" party and the "rightish" party is not huge, but only a moronic cynic would say it was zero, or that this kind of thing doesn't matter. Of course it matters. It makes a difference to my life. It alters the whole feel of the place where I'm living. It can make the difference between staying and going. Will rents go up in Berlin? Will Hisae have to pay for her education here? Will there be more and more cars on the streets? Will there be war, and will there be terrorist bombs to contend with afterwards?

I always support the leftish party. I have a visceral hatred towards the rightish party and all their arguments. For instance, it gladdens my heart to see wind farms all over Germany. You see them from the plane as you fly in, and you feel you're in a civilised country. About 80% of Germans want nuclear power phased out altogether and alternatives like wind power to be investigated. A similar proportion of Germans were against any German participation in the Iraq war. The rightish candidate, Angela Merkel, knows this, but is, because she's rightish, more likely than Schroeder to want to keep nuclear power and restrict wind farms, or to help the Americans in future wars. She's just careful about the way she phrases these unpopular positions; I watched the TV debate, and of course she was saying "We will consider all forms of electricity generation, but not give undue prominence to things like wind power". But the message was clear. Why will she win, if Germans like things like free education, green power, good public transport, good healthcare? She'll win because people are worried about the high rate of German unemployment and think that Merkel will perk up the economy with her pro-capitalist policies. (The irony is that the "social" German economy is, according to The Economist, suddenly doing much better than Britain's, where Merkel-style deregulation has recently been failing.)

Although, as a socialist, I do believe that history is "progressing leftwards" and that socialism is the inevitable result of the democratic process, there's been a very marked pattern through my life of "temporary" setbacks to this overall and inevitable trend. In 1975 my family came back from Canada to the socialist Britain of Jim Callaghan. Four years later, Britain swung right, electing Margaret Thatcher (and keeping the Conservatives in power for a dismal 19 years). Isn't it funny how "reform" and "liberalisation" have become progressive-sounding buzzwords for people handing social power back to private enterprise, by the way? My view of the "inevitable" movement towards socialism is based on the idea that the tendency of Western societies since the Enlightenment has been to "reform" social practices (to widen suffrage, to eradicate child labour, and so on). But the word "reform", since the end of the 1970s, has come to have a completely different meaning. Now it means to dismantle state control and hand power to private interests. Thus Koizumi's failed attempt to privatize the Japanese Post Office (and his failure is the reason he called the election, so that he can have a second go at it after consolidating his power) is described as "reform". So when did "reform" stop being about governments protecting people from the ravages of unscrupulous bosses and aristocrats, and start being about selling public assets to tycoons and barons? When did "liberalism" start to mean taking the side of the shareholder against the citizen?

In 1994 I moved to France, where Mitterand was still president, still enhancing Paris with grandiose grands projets built with public money. I felt good in Mitterand's France, but within a year he was dead. Within a month of taking office, his rightish successor Chirac announced the resumption of French nuclear tests in the South Pacific — tests which had been halted in 1992 by his leftish predecessor, Mitterrand. In 2000 I moved to Clinton's America. I liked Clinton, but within a year he too was gone, replaced by the vile, criminal, rightish Bush.

Lest the pattern be too neat (Momus swings into leftish state, state swings right), there are anomalies. Anomaly One is that I moved back from Paris to London in 1997 just in time to celebrate what looked like a leftish swing — John Major's Conservative government was pushed out by Tony Blair's New Labour. But who could have known at the time that this too was a swing to the right, a victory for their sort of reformism, not ours? Just how rightish Blair has become is evident in the fact that, should Ken Clarke win the Tory leadership contest, the Conservatives will be to the left of New Labour on many issues. (Clarke was, for instance, against the Iraq war.) So Anomaly One isn't an anomaly at all, just a clever piece of rebranding (Labour used to be leftish, so New Labour winning will look like a swing to the left while actually being a swing to the right). As for Anomaly Two, the fact that I moved to Japan in 2001 just when "new broom" Junichiro Koizumi came along to "reform" the LDP and Japan's "creaky financial system", well, it turned out that Koizumi's brand of reform was of the "shareholder" variety rather than the "citizen" kind. Which is why Japan will swing in a "liberal" direction next week by keeping him in power rather than a liberal one.

Comments

Zig-zag

[(Anonymous)]

Based on what you've said, we should always ask you were you are planning to move, and then NOT move there!
Hi-five,
R.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

So if Clarke wins the Tories will be to the isolationist of New Labour on an isolationist-internationalist divide which doesn't fit neatly into left-right lines. Situation normal.

They'll still be led by the man who first introduced markets into the NHS, attacked teaching unions, and makes his living selling fags. A man who was so right-wing in his youth that Michael Howard quit the Cambridge Conservatives in protest at his obsession with Oswald Mosley, and a man whose radical leftism didn't stop him being a minister in conservative governments ever day between 1979 and 1997, throughout the poll tax, several wars, and rail privatisation.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> When did "liberalism" start to mean taking the side of the shareholder against the citizen?
The 18th Century?

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

In saying that, I'm glad you think Socialism is inevitable. I find it very difficult to think like that, whilst in Blair's Britain :(

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, I should really say "liberalization" rather than liberalism. But the ambiguity does exist in the common root word, "liberal". Context, and who's using it meaning "good", determines its alignment left or right.

[32elvismovies.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, since you've mentioned you lived here many years ago - do you keep in touch with Canadian politics at all?

[mo-no-chrome.livejournal.com]

And did you ever move to a rightish country? And if so, what happened?

Because if the process works in reverse, I really wish you'd consider a move to Australia. We're more than a decade into our very own Thatcher period with no signs of change on the horizon. We seem to be running about 15 years behind Britain, so I suppose we'll eventually have New Labour to look forward to as well...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was a teen at the time, and only vaguely aware of the Quebec separatist movement etc. Actually, I like the way that issue turned out. Montreal has lost some economic strength as a result of the exodus of the anglophones, but it's gained in cultural vibrancy, I think — in other words, it's become a bit like the Berlin I love, and hope won't be turned by the Merkelites into another "economic success story" that's shitty to live in.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I may be coming to Australia early next year, so let's watch and see what happens!

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

I'll be very saddened if Merkel wins.

And you should have stayed in Canada. Trudeau is one of my great heroes. I suppose you'd have still ended up in Thatcherland eventually, though.

[cementimental.livejournal.com]

To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth. - William S Burroughs

[cementimental.livejournal.com]

Well, National Socialism maybe...

:)

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

People like Political Compass would argue that the problem is that "liberal" refers to politics of the individual versus the state, and is independent of what form that state takes. Free market neo-Liberals (Libertarians) can agree with Liberal Socialists about democracy and personal freedoms, while having totally opposite views about jobs, money and 'the market'.

Of course, any term is only as good as the people who use it and no language is neutral - the New Right have stolen words like "reform" while demonising terms like "Socialism" (tedious right wingers braying on about how Hitler was a socialist).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good quote. But there's still a lot of correlation between the position of the cloth and the position of the bullfighter, isn't there? And when we hear political debate, aren't we always reading between the lines as if to say "Well, if the cloth is there, the politician is probably over here"?

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Postal reform is a red herring.

[caoilte.livejournal.com]

a pretty big red herring then. Perhaps you could link to some sort of analysis. Or do you mean red herring as in this is really just a stand up fight between progressives and the powers of vested interest/political patronage?

[cementimental.livejournal.com]

Very true!

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

I think it's important to know the people you think are your enemies. I felt the same way about things as you do until, a few months ago, I decided to take a closer look at the way my enemies thought about things. It turned out they're not so bad after all.

I want to recommend, if you get some free time, reading these interviews with Milton Friedman. His views are polar to J.K. Galbraith and Keynes. That may put you off at first, but try to keep an open mind.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/press_site/people/friedman_intv.html

http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/mf7.html

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Misc/friedm1.htm

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

How hard is it to move to Germany?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

INTERVIEWER: Why are free markets and freedom inseparable?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Freedom requires individuals to be free to use their own resources in their own way

MOMUS: Stop right there, Milton! First of all, what if I want to be free to take a tram through central London? I want to be able to use publicly-owned resources, not my own, and I want to be able to use them the same way everyone else does. Are you telling me I have to buy and own a car, and then compete with other "free" folk to find a place to park it?

FRIEDMAN: ...and modern society requires cooperation among a large number of people. The question is, how can you have cooperation without coercion? If you have a central direction you inevitably have coercion. The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

MOMUS: Wait! So I'm not being coerced by corporations like Microsoft, and they're not centralised? And nobody has ever cooperated except for money? Utter rubbish!

INTERVIEWER: Marxists say that property is theft. Why, in your view, is private property so central to freedom?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Because the only way in which you can be free to bring your knowledge to bear in your particular way is by controlling your property. If you don't control your property, if somebody else controls it, they're going to decide what to do with it, and you have no possibility of exercising influence on it.

MOMUS: I might be "free" to control my own property (hey, I own this house, I can paint it!) but other people having property restricts my freedom. Hey, this meadow isn't public property any more, someone bought it! Sorry, Friedman, I'm not listening to any more, you're a nitwit. (Makes to leave)

FRIEDMAN: Wait, I was just getting around to the black market! Now, obviously you'd like a world in which you obey the law. The fact that the black market involves breaking the law is something against it. It's an undesirable feature. But this only exists when there are bad laws...

MOMUS: (Has left building)

[(Anonymous)]

it depends on which country you come from. very easy if you have an eu-passport, little problem with usa or canada, japan should be ok. it's easy to obtain a visa, and some of my friens from new york, who live here in berlin for quite a while now never had any problems.
eastern europe and russia? not so easy. but if you're from a so called 3. world country, it's nearly impossible. you would have to marry someone with a german passport

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

This is amusing. You're sort of like Lt. Slothrop in "Gravity's Rainbow", who kept scoring in spots of London where German bombs were about to drop.

Perhaps some shadowy international organizations are tracking your movements and trying to figure out what sort of psycho-spiritual connection you have to political transitions of power.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

...

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Don't move to Sweden Momus, we still have our leftish government here and would like to keep it.

Though there is a part of of the leftists here that doesn't like EU. They hate it and blame alot of Swedens "new troubles" on EU. So in other words, there are not many global-communists around here as perhaps out in the rest of Europe.

But our government made a few, or even more, bad decisions when we entered EU.

"We didn't needed to import certain chemicals. Now we have to."

"We didn't have to import meat that might've been infested with "madcow". But we do now, because of EU."

I am not very sceptical to EU, but I am afraid that I don't have anybody around me that can explain it really well to me.

Euro election went fucked up, thank you very much nationalistic swedes!

Also, thankyou my parents for voting right wings because "it issn't getting any better".

Why am I still here in Sweden?

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

I wish I believed that socialism is inevitable, but I don't think it's true at all. I think we're always at the brink of barbarism or some sort of autocratic or theocratic rule. Always.

And the right learned from the left's ideas about identity theory and the power of words. They learned those lessons much more thoroughly then the left, and have learned to 'brand' their unpopular positions with pleasant titles. The left... the left is lost... it doesn't learn the lessons that it came up with.

Well Put... How old are you again?

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

You certainly made more sence than alot of the people... I too thought that the Euro election was a tragic mess.. I could come up with a number of conspiricy theories since there was an obvious personality to the success and sudden failure of the champaign...

And the Nationalists who voted no.. (which strangely enough up until I got the whole story instead of the hype, I too would say.. with the EU being such a fiasco, did we (as a collective of people living in Sweden) need or want to be forced into yet another thing..(thinking about things like "the Belgian Blue" and the shops forced into buying meat from such a deformed animal strictly bread to suffer and die horribly..yet very profitably...

I think you have a very good grasp of the conciquences.. and now without the Euro in our favour, we look as though we have been bullied into a number of things, and yet are not really "insiders".. and without Anna Lindh, we don't have a good representive doing work for OUR favour..

In the news there were schools in Norbotten, they could have claimed some of that EU money, but didn't and yet we pay for that membership..

Momus, see this young man's plea and mine too.. don't come to live in Sweden.. ;)

[dixie-flatline.livejournal.com]

As far i know you visited russia and nothing happened.
maybe u try again? :)))

[facehead2k.livejournal.com]

You may be cursed. Voting with one's feet doesn't promote working and building communities we want to live in. It promotes moving where the work is easier or already started/done for you. Progress doesn't move leftward or rightward; it moves forward. Sadly it puts its foot forward only enough to keep it from tumbling over.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I visited there for the first time last week (I moved to Canada about a year ago), and I spent most of my time wondering which European capital each bit of the town reminded me of. Berlin did feature, but more the grimmer parts. I don't think it's anywhere near as culturally interesting as Berlin, to be honest, but it was better off in that respect than Toronto (where I'm living for the time being).

Or it may be that Montreal culture's not as accessible. My French sucks. But then again, so does my German.

[kitchen-life.livejournal.com]

I was just going to post, "well then please don't move to Sweden any time soon...", but decided to make sure no one had already done so.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

socialist or communist countries are by nature closer to autocratic rule because there is one state that runs everything. You can't speak freely against the state because they pay your wage, make your food, and give you housing.

Capitalist countries are also unlikely to fall into some kind of theocracy because if you deny citizenship to peole of other religions then you are potentially losing out on intelligent, skilled, efficient workers.

When I was liberal I had pretty the same fears. But they're completely unfounded.

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

:D

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Autocratic means rule by one. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocratic) Therefore, it's precisely the opposite of socialism, which is rule by popular collectives. These can take many forms, and are not necessarily tied to a form of representative government (anarco-socialists, for example, believe in worker's councils, not a centralized State). So, by definition, you're wrong.

However, that said, many communist (and a few socialist) states have slid to totalitarian states (which, again, is completely different from an autocracy).

Capitalist countries are unlikely to fall into some kind of theocracy, but not for the reasons you state. We're losing intelligent, skilled, and efficient workers in mass (the lowest math and science scores of any industrial country and lower than many second world countries) but we're still a capitalist country. Capitalism is an economic system that cares little about the religion of the land, as long as the flow of goods is unimpeded.

Democracies, however, are less likely to fall into some kind of theocracy, only because they tend to give their minorities power against the tyranny of the majority. However, even in the U.S. you can see that power is tenuous - for example, look at the recent fights about stem cells, Terry Shiavo, and most importantly, 'intelligent design', which are all fought (and largely won by) religiously. Over half of the country believes that intelligent design should be taught in schools - that's not a sign that we're headed toward a theocracy, but it is a sign that religion is more powerful in the U.S. than in the vast majority of the world.

So, no, those fears are not unfounded, whether you're a liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, or flat-earther.

That's an easy question

[(Anonymous)]

You're living what is essentially an unsustainable lifestyle. You move to an area that can afford to indulge in art and pleasure, and eventually its resources are tapped by the flood of like-minded immigrants. Once the area is hobbled financially, its politics naturally turn rightist.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

swings and roundabouts

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Merkel might not get to govern, even though her party should get more votes than any other (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/09/08/merkel_feels_the_pressure.html)

My that was a long link...

[32elvismovies.livejournal.com]

Let's hope not. There's always a fear of the Conservative/Reform party winning an upcoming election here, but I think the Liberals are still leading in the polls. Just don't move back here anytime soon;)

In other news, despite diminishing prices today, Montreal is still blessed with the highest gas prices in the country:

(http://www.home-sick.org/eric/images/gas.jpg)

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

But you don't understand. It's EASIER to do...which, in today's world, makes it the RIGHT thing to do.

Re: That's an easy question

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Word.

[(Anonymous)]

Funnily enough I had a dream that you were visiting Sydney, you were wearing a large coat made out of synthetic orange feathers and came to sing at my art school, ah if you do visit and I might just have to make you a orange synthetic bird coat

[sweetnessss.livejournal.com]

I really hope that somehow, this time it won't swing on you, on me, on us... I'll certainly vote Schroeder!
I just adore him for not participating in the US wars, and also for that he defended his wife against merkels attack during the TV-duell. by the way, aren't wind farms extremely beautiful?