Global Alienation: Governments and Their Citizens

The first decades of the twenty-first century have brought terrorism, erratic financial patterns, waves of international migration, and - in response - bizarre political movements. Traditional political groupings and coalitions are dissolving, and new constellations arising.

Around the world, political candidates are endorsing policy options previously thought to belong to mutually exclusive camps. Writing in London’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf notes that “Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France or Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party” are “politicians who combine the nativism of the hard right, the statism of the hard left and the authoritarianism of both.”

Wolf argues that national political processes have abandoned their responsibilities to the citizens of their respective nations, and have instead become part of a global constellation of political views:

The projects of the rightwing elite have long been low marginal tax rates, liberal immigration, globalisation, curbs on costly “entitlement programmes”, deregulated labour markets and maximisation of shareholder value. The projects of the leftwing elite have been liberal immigration (again), multiculturalism, secularism, diversity, choice on abortion, and racial and gender equality. Libertarians embrace the causes of the elites of both sides; that is why they are a tiny minority.

In the process, elites have become detached from domestic loyalties and concerns, forming instead a global super-elite

One of the foundational principles of the modern nation-state is that civil rights are for citizens. When non-citizens begin to consume a growing part of the nation’s material and political resources, voting citizens

are alienated. They are losers, at least relatively; they do not share equally in the gains. They feel used and abused. After the financial crisis and slow recovery in standards of living, they see elites as incompetent and predatory. The surprise is not that many are angry but that so many are not.

The argument can be made, and Martin Wolf cites lots of statistics in making it, that working-class wages have been stagnant for several decades across the industrialized world. If incomes in the upper lower class and the lower middle class lag behind the productivity of the total economy, and non-citizens are consuming a growing share of a nation’s wealth in the forms of social benefit programs from the government, the result is the rise of “populist” candidates, like “Ms. le Pen or Mr. Farage.”

The net effect of this shift is to draw attention to the concept of citizenship, a concept which has been neglected in recent decades. There is a difference between a citizen and someone who merely happens to live in a particular country.

Elections across Europe manifest the growing attractiveness of political parties who emphasize the rights of citizens. Wolf writes that:

Western countries are democracies. These states still provide the legal and institutional underpinnings of the global economic order. If western elites despise the concerns of the many, the latter will withdraw their consent for the elite’s projects.

Democracy takes various forms. In modern nation-states, its form is a republic with freely elected representatives.

Direct democracies, as schoolchildren know, work, at most, only in small villages. The structure of a republic not only deals better with larger populations spread over larger territories, but it also prevents a majority from abusing a minority.

But in any form of democracy, the foundational concept is that of citizenship. Without a clear understanding of citizenship, democracy is impossible.

Wolf argues that the growing resentment among citizen voters against the global elite is the result of emerging evidence that this elite has lost the vision that the purpose of a government is to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of its citizens.

Feeling abandoned, feeling that the traditional political elites no longer seek to protect civil rights, voters look elsewhere. Populists are gaining followers, while the

Elites of the left have lost the allegiance of swaths of the native middle classes. Not least, democracy means government by all citizens. If rights of abode, still more of citizenship, are not protected, this dangerous resentment will grow. Indeed, it already has in too many places.

In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel squandered her popularity by admitting into the country an immense flood of “Syrian refugees” - many of whom turned out to be neither Syrians nor refugees. When groups of Muslim men orchestrated gangrapes of German women in different cities at the same time, much of Merkel’s political capital evaporated.

Those political parties which are viewed as a part of the new populist wave, and not part of the old elite establishment, gained against Merkel’s party, the CDU/CSU, in subsequent elections. The party known as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one such party.

From Britain to France to Germany, populist parties emerge in response to the perception that citizenship has been devalued. This is happening in other nations as well. Voters are posing a question: what is the meaning of national citizenship in the twenty-first century?

Is the Planet in the Midst of Rebounding from the Little Ice Age?

Two events dominate the history, as opposed to prehistory, of the planet’s climate: the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age.’ These represent statistical outliers, the high points and the low points of measured global temperature.

These measurements are based on tree-rings, the recorded advance and retreat of glaciers, written records of rainfall and of snowfall, written records about when rivers and lakes froze over, etc.

For its purposes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines the ‘Little Ice Age’ as lasting from 1450 to 1850, while the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ runs from 950 to 1250.

These two eras both occurred before significant industrialization and before the use of fossil fuels in significant quantities, and can therefore be said to be non-anthropogenic.

The IPCC notes that “most glaciers around the globe have been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age.” If the Little Ice Age lasted approximately 400 years, and we are now a little more than a century since its end, current glacial retreat patterns may be attributed, in part, to the plant’s return to its equilibrium, i.e., to temperatures held prior to the Little Ice Age.

Beginning and ending points for the Little Ice Age cannot be precisely determined. It was a generalized trend. Some scholars mark the endpoint nearer to 1800 than 1850.

But, although an exact endpoint cannot be given, it nonetheless makes sense that the end of the Little Ice Age would mark the beginning of a non-anthropogenic warming trend around the globe. The IPCC reports that “most permafrost has been degrading since the Little Ice Age.”

It would be remarkable if, at the end of a four-century-long cold era, the plant did not warm. Tautologically, that is the definition of the end of a cold age: planetary warming.

As the two extremes of measured historic planetary temperature, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age constitute reference points for other eras, including the current one.

By contrast, previous Ice Ages were not historic, but prehistoric, there being no direct observations and written records of them.

What caused these two outliers? Any answer must be merely speculative, but some scholars note that ice core samples from polar regions show that wide swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, non-anthropogenic in origin, may have accompanied both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age: the Implications of an Outlier

In the historical examination of climate change, two events form reference points in world history: the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling. Scholars are unable to give precise beginning and ending dates for such time segments, but it seems to have include a century or two both before and after the year 1600.

The Medieval Warm Period was also global in scope, and represented an extreme warming trend. Beginning shortly after the reign of Charlemagne, this era lasted several centuries.

Because both of these events - the term ‘singularity’ is justified - occurred prior to the recording of daily temperatures around the globe, they are documented by evidence such as the advance and retreat of glaciers, tree ring measurements, written observations of snowfall, and other data.

These two time spans are indeed outliers, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes in its report:

There is high confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450–1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950–1250).

The Little Ice Age, then, represents an extreme condition, an outlier well beyond any data points which have been observed in the last two or three centuries.

It also represents a condition with significant duration.

Both the Medieval Warm Period - which the IPCC calls the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ - and the Little Ice Age occurred prior to industrialization and prior to the use of coal and other fossil fuels in significant quantity. There is, then, no possibility of either time segment being anthropogenic.

If these two outliers - one much warmer, and one much cooler, than anything observed in recent centuries - are clearly not anthropogenic, then lesser variations in temperature can also be naturally occurring.

The Economic and Political Glories of Habsburg Vienna

The twentieth century seemed, to many observers, to host the triumph of democracy. When the century began, hereditary dynasties directly governed many nations, and indirectly governed other nations as colonies.

Two world wars and the end of most global empires saw the emergence of newly independent states, some of which fell prey to socialist dictatorships, but others of which did indeed establish themselves as democracies of one sort or another.

The word ‘democracy’ can refer to a spectrum of governmental structures, the most effective of which is a republic with freely-elected representatives.

Those who rejoiced at the rise of democracy in the twentieth century assumed that it would effectively usher in an era of sustained personal freedom for nearly everyone in a society, and that it would foster an increase in opportunities, allowing more members of the lower classes to move into the middle classes.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, some of the anticipated benefits of democracy did not appear, or at least not to the extent expected.

The economies of the world’s democracies don’t always run smoothly. Inflation and unemployment, which appear cyclically in any economy, linger longer. The governments of the democratic nations accumulate public debt.

‘Safety net’ and ‘redistribution programs’ - like those designed to support the elderly or provide health care - have exacerbated government debt. Such programs transfer costs to the government, create an ever-growing dependency class among the lower classes, create a politics of entitlement among the middle classes, and are unsustainable in the long run, as individuals find ways to maximize received benefits while avoiding taxes, and as the recipient class grows while the productive class shrinks - which is the result of incentivizing membership in the recipient class, and the result of penalizing productivity.

Personal freedom and political liberty were the anticipated benefits of democracy, but Balkanization and tribalization have damaged both. As competing cultural groups sharpen their mutual enmity, they demand increasing conformity both from the their own members and from members of their opposition. Governments, seeking to moderate these tensions, reduce free speech, free press, and free expression. This is one source of what we now call ‘political correctness.’

Whereas ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ were once regarded as nearly synonymous, it is now clear that democracy can, and does, damage freedom.

This, in turn, gives rise to a reappraisal of history. Monarchies and other pre-democratic forms of government were once seen as the oppressive enemies of freedom. Now, however, historians note the amazing diversity and creativity of many monarchical societies. Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:

Meanwhile, Habsburg-Austria and the proto-typical pre-democratic Austrian experience assumed no more than historical interest. To be sure, it was not that Austria had not achieved any recognition. Even democratic intellectuals and artists from any field of intellectual and cultural endeavor could not ignore the enormous level of productivity of Austro-Hungarian and in particular Viennese culture. Indeed, the list of great names associated with late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna is seemingly endless. However, rarely has this enormous intellectual and cultural productivity been brought in a systematic connection with the pre-democratic tradition of the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, if it has not been considered a mere coincidence, the productivity of Austrian-Viennese culture has been presented “politically correctly” as proof of the positive synergistic effects of a multi-ethnic society and of multi-culturalism.

The impressive list of composers, poets, painters, architects, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers who worked and thrived in Habsburg centers like Vienna and Prague is indeed long.

Democracy’s more simplistic enthusiasts are confounded by this result: they anticipate a gray uniformity in the absence of democracy, but instead they find an ingenuity and inventiveness exceeding that of many modern democratic societies. They anticipate a rigidly imposed uniformity in thought and worldview, but instead find a diversity of religious, economic, and political perspectives.

Once a host to Metternich’s suspicious view of free markets in 1814 and 1815, Vienna transformed itself into a thriving import-export economy a century later. Although the Kaiserlich und Königlich beaurocracy did represent an obstacle to economic flexibility, the imperial government was generally content to allow merchants to operate freely, and did not impose wage and price controls.

It is a mistake to institute democracy and anticipate that it will automatically produce personal freedom, political liberty, free markets, and prosperity.

It is possible, in any one context, that democracy can give rise to these benefits, but it is not necessary that it will do so.

Democracy was seen as desirable, not in and of itself, but rather because it was assumed that it was a means to these benefits. A wiser course may be to forsake the pursuit of democracy, and instead directly seek personal freedom, political liberty, free markets, and prosperity.