Orwell and truth, today

 “The Ministry of Truth,” written by Dorian Lynskey, is a “biography” of George Orwell’s book “1984.”

It is a biography of a book, in two parts. In the first part, it explains how Orwell wrote the book in the 1940’s and which were the motivations for him at that time. The author had been in the Republican front line in the Spanish Civil War (he writes about that in “Homage to Catalonia”) and became a fierce critic of Stalinism from the left. “1984” is a dystopia of what could happen in the extreme if totalitarian regimes took over the world, with the fresh memory of Hitler and the contemporary experience of the Soviet Union in mind. Orwell focuses on how the totalitarian regime would manipulate the truth and the mind of individuals.

In the second part, the book discusses the influence of the book after the death of its author shortly after he finished writing it. That is the most interesting part of the book. Although in the real year of 1984 things did not look as Orwell had predicted, Lynskey shows then that many aspects of the current world (where nazism has been long defeated and the Soviet Union no longer exists) are not that different from what Orwell had warned about. After all, we are in the times of post-truth and intrusive social media.

The book starts and ends with a reference to Donald Trump. In January 2017, the book explains, the new president took the oath of office and his press secretary later said that it was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” He could not prove his preposterous lie and described the statement as “alternative facts”. Over the next four days, US sales of “1984” rocketted by almost 10.000 per cent, making it a number one best-seller.

The afterword of the paperback edition finishes with a reminder of the speech given by Donald Trump after the election he lost against Joe Biden, in which he alleged, without any evidence, that there was widespread election fraud and that he was, in effect, the victor. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump had told thousands of well documented lies. Those following him, believeing or not his lies, staged a coup on January 6th 2021 and are trying to put him again at the highest office in 2024, trying to learn from the mistakes that prevented them from winning in 2020.

Other examples of the manipulation of the truth are provided by China’s President, Xi, and by Vladimir Putin. Orwell was a democratic socialist who was critical of any form of totalitarianism, from the right or from the left. His most famous books are a criticism of Stalinism (“Homage to Catalonia”, “Animal Farm”). In his most important political experience, the Spanish Civil War, he sided with POUM, an anti-stalinist marxist Catalan group.

But the lesson today in democratic societies, according to the author of this great book, is that the biggest danger lies mostly with the radical right. Please, read “The Ministry of Truth”.

 

The Chicago Boys and the separation between politics and economics

Sebastian Edwards tells a fascinating story about “neoliberalism” and the Chicago Boys in Chile. The Chicago Boys are the Chilean economists trained in the University of Chicago who had important responsibilities during the Pinochet dictatorship and beyond. They were strongly influenced by economists such as Friedman, Hayek or Harberger, who advocated an expanded role for markets, and a very limited role for governments. Edwards is very well positioned to give a very complete and balanced account of the somehow unpleasant story of the participation of prestigious academic economists in the economic management of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile between 1973 and 1989. He was trained in Chicago University, but is not a Chicago Boy. Instead, he was a socialist activist opposed to the dictatorship in his youth. He shows empathy both for some of the economists involved, American (such as Friedman or Harberger) or Chilean, and for those who opposed the neoliberal model on occasion of the students’ demonstrations that ultimately led to the election of Gabriel Boric, a student leader, as President of the Republic in 2021.

In the 1990s and early 2000s (not before), there were great results to be shown for “the model.” But what was the model then? Actually, the best results took place in the years of the transition to democracy, when the democratically elected presidents belonged to the center-left coalition of La Concertación. The book explains very well that the center-left continued many of the neo-liberal aspects of the model (becuase of its success, because of lobbying from the elites, and because of constitutional constraints) with a more human touch, after the neoliberal model of shock therapy, privatizations and minimal government (except for law and order) had experienced an accute crisis in the early1980s.

Edwards explores three mistakes of the Chicago Boys: the failed pension system, the decision to fix the exchange rate by Chicago Boy Sergio de Castro that resulted in 25% unemployment in the early 1980s, and the narrow focus on extreme poverty instead of expanding it to inequality. The first and the third of these mistakes were among the topics on which the demonstrators focused in 2019 with the social revolt.

The book does not shy away from the moral responsability of the Chicago Boys and their American mentors. Sergio De Castro argued that when taking a job in the military government he was obbeying orders, and that politics and economics should be separated. Some economists easily find excuses in that things can be separated (politics and economics, technical and political issues, efficiency and equity…), when these matters come together in the real world. How could they not know that there were human rights abuses? They were in a government that was a human right abuse in itself, a government that had the original sin of starting by bombing (not precisely in secret) the official palace of a democratically elected president that, independently of his mistakes, had respected the Constitution of Chile.

Friedman and Harberger intervened for individual prisoners when they were requested to do so, but they never condemned the nature of a totalitarian government that did not respect elemental freedoms. These were great economists that contributed to reinforcing a crime.

For a while, they won the war of ideas, but this war was easier to win with guns and powerful lobbies. Now they have to fight it in an open, albeit imperfect, democratic society.

Sovereignism

I’m spending a few days in Lleida, one of the four province capitals in Catalonia, located in the northwest of the region. In the hotel where I’m staying, the very kind receptionist that welcomed me and my daughter when we arrived is from Eastern European origin. In the hotel’s neighbourhood, most shops, bars and restaurants appeal to the mostly African immigrant population. This is not uncommon in today’s Catalonia, a small open economy in the core of the euro zone.

Near the hotel, I spotted a VOX (the far right party, which has a small presence in the local city council of Lleida) election campaign poster: it shows the face of its leader and the word Fronteras (“Borders”), next to Lo que importa (“What matters”). Other things "that matter," in related posters, are “family” and “security.” Besides a conventional far right set of messages, VOX –a party that is reaching regional agreements across Spain with PP, the more conventional conservative party- also calls for the prevalence of Spanish justice over European justice, like the Brexiters, and a call to close borders to stop immigration, which to them is related to crime (according to data and facts, it is related to economic growth and prosperity).

An influential VOX in the Spanish government after the July 23rd election would mean the undoing of Spanish and European federalism, with a more centralist Spain in a more fragmented Europe. Wikipedia defines Sovereigntism, sovereignism or souverainism as the notion of having control over one's conditions of existence, whether at the level of the self, social group, region, nation or globe. Typically used for describing the acquiring or preserving political independence of a nation or a region, a sovereigntist aims to "take back control" from perceived powerful forces, either against internal subversive minority groups (ethnic, sexual or gender), or from external global governance institutions, federalism and supranational unions.

The world of parties like VOX is a world that would be frozen in time, with less diverse populations and harder borders, a world fragmented in ethnocracies and “pure” populations. Of course, that is almost impossible in today’s Europe, but that is what many sovereignist forces are calling for.

Sovereignism is a popular word in Catalonia, to many positively associated to the right of self determination (defended by many self-proclaimed leftists), interpreted as the right to secede, something that the Spanish Constitution (or any written democratic Constitution) does not allow. But it also defines the principles of VOX, Netanyahu and his allies, Modi, Meloni, Orban and many others.

There is also an openly xenophobic Catalan pro-independence party now, called Catalan Alliance, which is the party of the new mayor of Ripoll, the town where the yihadist terrorists of the Ramblas terror attack of 2017 came from. This party has reached the top job in the town because of the abstention of the more conventional separatist conservative party, Junts (“Together”). They plan to expand at the regional level.

Sovereignism is a key component of national-populism, both in the extreme left and the extreme right. The chair person of the Chilean conventional assembly that tried to draft a new Constituion last year, someone associated to left wing populism, and a representative of the Mapuche historically discriminated ethnic group, boasted in an event the support of Carles Puigdemont, the leader of Junts, last year. Nationalism, identitaranism or sovereignism are probably the most effective drivers of national-populism beyond traditional ideological divides.

Brexit and Rodrik’s trilemma

Michael Funke and Doudou Zhong do a great job at exploring empirically the famous Rodrik trilemma, by which there is a tension between hyperglobalization, national sovereignty and democracy, so that countries must choose two of the three corners of the trilemma (Rodrik himself explains it here). Using standard measures of globalization, national sovereignty and democracy, they confirm the relevance of the tension.

In explaining their contribution, they give useful examples of jurisdictions that take up different prototype corner solutions in the “two out of three” trade‐off. “For example, China sticks with global economic integration and national sovereignty. To this end, the triangle's third vertex, democracy, is sacrificed. At the other end of the spectrum, we see countries that have opted for deeply integrated markets and democracy vertices. Prime examples include EU countries which have transferred essential competences and jurisdiction to European institutions. The Euroland (common currency) subset of EU countries sits even deeper in this integration and global governance category.”

Funke and Zhong then relate Brexit to the trilemma: “The political priorities revealed by the Brexit referendum are national sovereignty and democracy.” The same message is given in the “official solutions” to exercises in chapter 18 of the CORE Project’s e-book “The Economy:” “voters supporting Brexit did not approve of the trade-off depicted in the bottom row of Figure 18.22. The vote reflected a popular movement that sought to increase national sovereignty that voters believed was sidetracked in pursuit of the benefits of hyperglobalization at the European level. The top row of Figure 18.22 also captures the preferred trade-off for those voting for Brexit,” meaning that British voters chose democracy and national sovereignty to the detriment of hyperglobalization.

Funke and Zhong implicitly accept that this statement is problematic, though, when they also use the trilemma to try to explain what they call the “third wave of autocratization” in recent years. Almost one‐third of the world's population lives in countries undergoing autocratization—a substantial decline of liberal democracy. Inter alia, these countries include Brazil, India, the United States (“America First”), as well as several Eastern European countries. Moreover, the world's leading autocracies, China and Russia, have influenced other countries to adopt their disdain for democracy. But it is well known that Farage (who had links with Russia during the campaign) and Johnson used some of the tools of the national-populist illiberal democratic leaders. A referendum full of lies where people did not know what they were voting for, an erosion of representative democracy and a crisis of Parliament, problems between the judicial powers and the executive… are not a sign of a healthy democracy. Besides, the leaders of Brexit where always clear that they did not want to leave globalization, but did not like the (pretty democratic by the way) European kind. Some comentators have used the metaphor of a “Syngapore on Thames.”

The authors accept that “populism supporting nationalism and restricting globalization, as well as the shift to more autocratic regimes is not an advisible policy prescription.” I agree. In a footnote, they write “Political economists have always been interested in the differences in the economic and political institutions across countries. That is reflected in the widely known “Varieties of Capitalism” debate investigating the cross‐national institutional variations of advanced economies. By analogy, a “Varieties of Globalization” debate is warranted.” And also one on “Varieties of Democracy.” Why some mainstream parties and elites have promoted nationalism in the recent past in some very important countries (the UK, the US, Israel, India…) to erode democracy (but not necessarily globalization) is something that we should keep studying.

The Rohingya and Facebook: A Case Study about hate

“Power and Progress,” the book recently published by Acemoglu and Johnson (AJ), should not be promoted as a book on technology written by two economists, but as a book about the battle for political and economic equality in times of technological change. It is an important book.  I look forward to reading reviews of it by other scolars in the forthcoming months and years. I hope that the debate that the authors try to encourage expands and at least awareness is raised about the importance of directing technological progress at the service of humanity and not the richest and powerful small minorities.

One of their messages is that the economic model of privately owned social media encourages the transmission of hate. We see that in developed democracies, every day. Grievances, ridiculous exagerations, insults, lies, whataboutisms… find a fast motorway in Facebook and Twitter. I am only in the latter, and the protections against hate there (which I try to use) seem to me like an umbrella to contain a nuclear attack. Worse: they are part of the problem, pretending they do something when the business model from which they profit is the engine of the problem.

AJ address the case of the abuse against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar in pages 356-359. By 2017 there were 22 million Facebook users in Myanmar out of a population of 53 million. In a “combustible mix of ethnic tension and incendiary propaganda,” Facebook employed only one person who monitored Myanmar and spoke Burmese but not most of the hundred or so languages used in the country. According to Acemoglu and Johnson and the independent sources they quote in their long bibliographic essay, “the platform had become the chief medium of organizing what the US would eventually call a genocide” against the Rohingya Muslim minority. 

What these economists say about Facebook’s business model had a dramatic, violent expression in Myanmar, but is applicable also in communities where at the moment there is now less (or no) violence: it was “based on maximizing user engagement (to enable the company to sell more individualized digital ads), and any messages that garnered strong emotions, including of course hate speech and provocative misinformation, were favored by the platform algorithms because they triggered intense engagement from thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of users.”

It’s the supply side of politics, stupid!

Larry Bartels is an essential author in the frontier between economics and political science. In his previous books, he established quite convincingly that the rich’s preferences have more weight in democratic collective decision making than the poor’s, and he debunked the “folk theory of democracy,” by which the solution to many democratic political problems would simply be more democracy, because, according to such folk theory voters are always right. And no, the solution is not less democracy, but lower expectations and better democracy.

I learned yesterday from a very good article in the Financial Times by Jan-Werner Müller –an author from whom I learned a lot in his book on populism- that Bartels had just published a new book, “Democracy Erodes from the Top.” I bouhgt it on Kindle, and after a first quick reading, I encourage anyone interested in European populism to get a copy.

In his new book, Bartels analyzes the recent evolution of populist parties in Europe and assesses the supposed crisis of democracy that results from it. After analyzing European public opinion in the last decades until 2019, the author challenges the idea that the surge in populism comes from the demand side of politics, from voters’ attitudes that would be more skeptical today about democracy and the European integration. That’s not what the data says.

What is more consistent with the historical data is that there’s always been a minoritary reservoir of extremist voters, but the size of this reservoir has not changed much over time, and especially it has not after the global financial crisis of 2008. The increasing influence of right wing nationalist populist forces is the result of supply side movements, by which conservative elites make choices that give more weight to destabilizing populists.

That is, Trump and Johnson are endogenous, and the result of their parties resorting to them to reach or keep power in particular historical moments. It is difficult not to think in the same terms in the local cases that are closer to me.

In Catalonia, it was the decision around 2012 of the conservative traditional nationalists of Jordi Pujol and Artur Mas to get hold of the secessionist banner, which increased the political relevance of national-populism in its most destabilizing form. They were surrounded by corruption allegations and criticism of their local version of austerity policies, and they decided to scapegoat “Madrid” for their problems, tapping on a reservoir of discontent based on some real and invented grievances.

The same now with VOX in Spain. The far right is obviously not new in Spain, actually the mainstream Popular Party was founded by a Francoist fromer minister. Now the PP is reaching regional and local agreements with VOX, raising the spectrum of a VOX-PP national coalition after the snap election on July 23rd. There are no more fascists in Spain now than 5 years ago, it’s just that the PP and the social and economic sectors that support it, may need them now more.

Inequality, fascism and populism in Italy and Spain

The current Italian government presided by Post-fascist politician Giorgia Meloni will organize a state funeral in the cathedral of Milan in honour of Silvio Berlusconi, arguably the founder of modern populism. He vertically integrated politics into his business, tried to subvert justice and allegedly had links with the Mafia. His ascent to power had to do with the disintegration of traditional political parties that colluded in a system to keep a strong (but moderate) Communist Party out of power in the times of the cold war.

Spain risks giving itself a government similar to the Italian, if the left and the center-left do not mobilize strongly in the snap election called for July 23rd. Although the current government of Pedro Sánchez is praised by the European Commission and the international media, and has managed the economy satisfactorily, the traditional conservative party, PP, founded by a minister of the military dictator Franco, allied with the far right party VOX, may win a majority. The right in Spain is unfortunately very different from the center-right in Germany, because the agreements that made the transition possible in Spain to lower the stakes of democracy (in the words of Stanford scholar Barry Weingast) kept almost intact traditional institutions such as the Monarchy, the Catholic Church and the economic and judicial elites. VOX is allied with Meloni, sympathises with Trump, questions climate change and is openly anti-feminist. The PP has no problem in sharing regional governments with them.

In my previous post, I listed the possible reasons why democracies such as Italy and Spain are compatible with high levels of inequality. All the reasons are applicable in our countries, as are applicable in other capitalist democracies. But a conservative movement and conservative elites that have had for different reasons a historical advantage make capture, lobbying and corruption (more affordable for the rich) especially present, to the extreme of vertical integration in the case of Italy. I mentioned in my previous post “Agenda-setting and mobilization of non-distributive agendas by the rich (strategic political supply, eg plutocratic populism).” Nationalisms feeding each other, anti-immigration feelings and cultural battles are clearly present in the two countries. Trumpian techniques such as lies and de-humanizing insults to the political rivals are also part of the tool-kit.