Proof that wingnuttia is pandemic

By Carl

You may think that rightwing conservatism is a brand best kept bottled in the springs of Red State America, but then you'd miss all the imported goodness of fine British whine:

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

I'll get to that last clever construct shortly.

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word "global", as in "global economic crisis", meant: "It's not my fault". To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

Because, you see, no government has ever made a treaty with another sovereign nation.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

I wonder what planet Janet Daley lives on? The "will of the corporations who can afford to contribute millions to the coffers of those greedy and plastic-moraled enough to run for government" is the order of the day, madam.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational "legally binding agreements", what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous "democratic deficit" of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

Welcome to the party, pal! Decades late and a few marbles short, Ms Daley has suddenly awoken to the New World Order that George HW Bush and his scion have inflicted on America. She proves the adage that even the galactically stupid can somehow squeeze out a brain fart.

Only instead of seeing conspiracies in, say, oil pricing or outsourcing of jobs, Ms Daley chooses to focus on issues that, indeed, DO affect the entire planet. It's a little hard to solve global warming unilaterally, toots!

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Strawman in three....two....one...

Well, yes and no. Calling a problem "global" is meant to imply three different things: that it is the result of the actions of people in different countries; that those actions have impacted on the lives of everyone in the world; and that the remedy must involve pretty much identical responses or correctives to those actions. These are separate premises, any of which might be true without the rest of them necessarily being so. The banking crisis certainly had its roots in the international nature of finance, but the way it affected countries and peoples varied considerably according to the differences in their internal arrangements. Britain suffered particularly badly because of its addiction to public and private debt, whereas Australia escaped relatively unscathed.

You might think that, Ms Daley. But you'd be wrong. (note that one of those articles refers to a piece in the Dec. 2007 issue of The Economist calling the banking crisis almost to the day it breaks)

That a problem is international in its roots does not necessarily imply that the solution must involve the hammering out of a uniform global prescription: in fact, given the differences in effects and consequences for individual countries, the attempt to do such hammering might be a huge waste of time and resources that could be put to better use devising national remedies. France and Germany seem to have pulled themselves out of recession over the past year (and the US may be about to do so) while Britain has not. These variations owe almost nothing to the pompous, overblown attempts to find global solutions: they are largely to do with individual countries, under the pressure of democratic accountability, doing what they decide is best for their own people.

...mostly by borrowing from other nations. But it's not global, noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

The word "global" has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily "narrow" and self-serving. (Never mind that a "global agreement" will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations.) Nor is our era so utterly unlike previous ones, for all its technological sophistication. We have always needed multilateral agreements, whether about trade, organised crime, border controls, or mutual defence.

Global Thermonuclear Annihilation must have Ms Daley's vibrator set to stun. Suddenly, she acknowledges an internationalist community of longstanding, but hey, global agreements have never been around. The United Nations is a sham theatre created by the American right wing in order to placate the dirty Third Worlders.

But note too the rather silly claim that "a 'global agreement' will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations," when in point of fact, what held up the Copenhagen accords and kept the most powerful nation on the planet out of Kyoto was the limitation of power imposed by these agreements. Hmmmmmmmmm...you can't have it both ways, Ms Daley: either the most powerful nations on the planet impose their will or they do not.

Note too that she feels the Mafia rates a global agreement, but global warming which will create more devastation and destruction, corruption and criminality than the Mafia ever dreamed of, not so much.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that, for this American, the blatant idiocy of this column makes me think we may have a new columnist for Renew America. If she can slip into this country illegally.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)