New Right Takes on Liberalism

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

The populistic despair in large sections of the American electorate that propelled Donald Trump to power in 2016 and continues to support him through thick and thin has now been given some ideological heft.

Several American writers have recently published books criticizing the American liberal order, root and branch. Three of them, University of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari come from the Catholic right.

Religion and culture

These “post-liberal” authors have jettisoned the older conservative tradition associated with figures such as William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. For them, the true conservative tradition lies in what is sometimes called “integralism,” the weaving of religion, personal morality, national culture and public policy into a unified theory of a proper political order.

Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating. How, they ask, has this come about?

Deneen’s new work, “Regime change: Toward a postliberal future,” is scathing in its description of the state America currently finds itself. For him, modernity has had a baneful effect on the political culture.

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Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating. 

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While earlier generations understood that true freedom resides in “self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government,” liberal modernists, in Deneen’s opinion, catastrophically reimagined it as “liberation from limitations imposed by birthright,” leading to a kind of social and cultural free-for-all.

“Modern thought,” writes Deneen, “rests on a core assumption: transformative progress is a key goal of human society.”

A new tyranny

Corrosive of every form of social life, liberal ideology, in his view, is an “anti-culture,” a “new tyranny,” a “totalitarian undertaking,” and “national suicide.” Liberals, he asserts, have purposely eroded the basic forums of social solidarity, that of “family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community.”

They now govern as a minority against the popular majority – what he terms “the many.” As a result, the problem of politics today is the gulf that separates the powerful from the masses.

Such liberals preach that the only reasonable life is one liberated from the constraints of duty and tradition, “all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the ‘culture’ comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods.”

These coastal urbanities have abandoned anyone not in what he sarcastically calls the “laptop class” and have left the country’s geographic middle hollowed out and despondent.

Remaking the country will require “aristopopulism,” a regime headed by a new elite of trained aristoi (from the Greek for “the best people”) who “understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.”

Common good

So, Deneen’s alternative to an “exhausted, licentious liberalism” is a form of politics that stresses “the priority of culture, the wisdom of the people,” and “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity.” It is a conservatism that seeks what he and others label “the common good.”

In the realm of law and practical policy, no one has done more to define this kind of common good than Vermeule. His "Common good constitutionalism" aims to recover a mode of thinking that he believes has been forgotten. In this view, law’s purpose is to promote what a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. This legacy, he maintains, has been lost, and Vermeule argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.”

The common good is “unitary and indivisible, not an aggregation of individual utilities,” a definition that requires preferring judicial rulings that favour obligation to one’s family and community, empowering lower levels of authority such as states and towns, and upholding what Vermeule understands as natural law.

Liberals have erected a constitutional order in which legitimacy derives from rights-bearing individuals who periodically choose representatives to write statutes, judge disputes, and keep the peace.

But if those structures produce outcomes contrary to the common good, Vermeule does not hesitate to state that they will have to be dismantled. The basis for rightful authority should be the “objective legal and moral order” that common-good constitutionalists are best placed to perceive.

Rigged system

The premise of Amhari’s “Tyranny, Inc.: How private power crushed American liberty – and what to do about it,” is that “private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments” and that “unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.”

The book makes the argument that the country’s leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to dictate what people are allowed to think.

Ahmari’s worker-oriented conservatism contends that even well-meaning elites are no match for a system rigged so rampantly in favour of the bosses. An employer, simply by dint of being an employer, “faces an economic compulsion that forces him to coerce the worker, regardless of his cultural outlook.”

These writers seek to provide what we might call “old-new” ways of dealing with America’s formidable political problems. Will they gain currency?

 

 

The Geopolitical Contest Over Small Island States

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Earlier in my academic career at the University of Prince Edward Island, I was involved with the Institute of Island Studies. My own concentration was researching the political systems of self-governing tropical islands and archipelagos.

These are very small sovereign micro-states, both in size and population, found mainly in the Indian and Pacific oceans. In the past, they had become possessions of the major European powers, including Germany, Spain, France, and – especially – Great Britain. Later, Japan and the United States joined the list.

They are now independent entities, but their importance has not diminished. Their land areas may be modest, but they have exclusive economic zones (EEZs) extending out to 200 nautical miles in the surrounding waters.

For example, the Seychelles, 115 islands in the Indian Ocean 1,700 kilometres northeast of Mauritius, has a landmass of only 452 square kilometres, but the islands are spread wide over an EEZ of 1.33 million square kilometres.

Today, their 100,000 inhabitants have become part of a geopolitical tug of war between China and the U.S. In June, the country became the latest in a string of small nations around the world in which Washington has established, restored or is planning to open an embassy.

Meanwhile, China has built schools, hospitals, houses for low-income families, and public amenities, winning sympathy among those who felt abandoned by the U.S. departure 27 years ago. China constructed the National Assembly building and the adjoining Supreme Court, both important symbols of the country’s identity as a nation.

“They do the little things that America doesn’t do,” Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan told the Washington Post in an interview published Sept. 3. “This is why countries like China have come in, because there was a vacuum.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in the capital, Victoria, in January 2021. He met with the country’s foreign minister, Sylvestre Radegonde, and described the Seychelles as “an important member of the big family of China-Africa solidarity and cooperation.”

In much bigger Mauritius, Beijing has been pouring investments into the country, developing its tourist infrastructure and buying friends and influence there. The U.S. fears that China might build a military base in the Chagos Archipelago once those islands, currently governed by Britain, return to Mauritian control.

Washington currently has a major American military base on Diego Garcia. The 27 square kilometre atoll is Washington’s most important asset in the vast Indo-Pacific region west of Pearl Harbour. It doesn’t want to give away its crucial strategic asset, so it is currently bargaining with Mauritius over giving it a lease to the Chagos.

China is the only country to have maintained diplomatic missions in all six of the Indian Ocean Island nations. None of the traditional players -- the U.S, Great Britain, India, or France -- have embassies in all six, though the Maldives, south of India, will host a new American legation soon.

China also does not have any standing territorial or sovereignty disputes in the Indian Ocean, unlike former colonial powers Britain and France, so Beijing is often considered a welcome player and an alternative in the region.

In January 2022, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi flew to Moroni, the capital of the Comoros for bilateral talks with his counterpart. This three-island country of 850,000 people off the coast of east Africa is just 1,861 square kilometres in area but sits on the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, a critical waterway.

China is everywhere in the Pacific as well. In the island kingdom of Tonga, their impressive embassy hosts diplomats, while young Tongans are invited on student exchanges to Chinese universities.

In response, Tonga and the Solomon Islands saw American embassies opened this year, and elsewhere in the Pacific they are planned for Kiribati and Vanuatu. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken became the first-ever Cabinet official to visit Tonga this past July, dedicating the new embassy in the capital, Nukuʻalofa.

In 2019, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands both switched their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. Foreign Minister Wang visited both countries during an eight-country Pacific tour in May 2022.

One month earlier, the Solomon Islands announced that it signed a security agreement with China, just days before an American official was due to visit the Pacific nation in an attempt to derail the pact.

As for Fiji, police cooperation between China and Fiji began in 2011 based on a secretive memorandum of understanding on police cooperation between Beijing and the government of then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

Last December, however, Bainimarama lost the prime minister’s office to Sitiveni Rabuka, a longtime rival who ran a campaign critical of China. A month later, Rabuka announced he intended to terminate the police agreement with Beijing.

Rabuka this past August also said he hoped the Pacific islands would remain a “zone of peace, a zone of non-aligned territories.” He spoke after attending a summit of the leaders of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and host country Vanuatu, members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, meeting in Port Vila.

Fiji a week earlier had co-hosted an Indo-Pacific defence chiefs conference with the U.S., which China attended.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Ishamel Kalsakau himself came under fire for signing a security deal with Australia, after some lawmakers feared it could upset China, a major infrastructure lender.

 

Drafting New Constitution for Chile No Easy Task

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Utter the words “nine eleven” and what instantly comes to mind? The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, of course.

But that’s not the case in Chile. On Sept. 11, 1973, that South American country witnessed the violent overthrow of the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and its replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet set to work designing a constitution that would consolidate executive power, constrain democratic representation, and enshrine free market fundamentalism. In 1980, seven years after the coup, Chile got a new constitution. He set the country on a path of such extreme neo-liberalization that Chile would become the only country in the world with a constitutionally privatized water system.

Debt soared and Chile became the most unequal country in the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Chile’s tuition fees rank among the highest in the world, trapping students in cycles of debt repayment that can last decades.

In October 2019, the country exploded in student-led protests. The unrest was sparked by a hike in public transportation prices, but it quickly expanded into broader demands for greater equality and more social protections. The demonstrators were brutally suppressed by President Sebastian Pinera, who authorized the deployment of the Chilean Army to enforce order.

A year later, Chileans turned out in record numbers to vote in a special plebiscite for a new constitution, organized in the wake of the protests: 78.28 per cent voted in favour, and 79 per cent for a convention of elected citizens to write it.

The charter that emerged from the Constitutional Convention elected in July 2021 was the first in the world written by a body split equally between male and female delegates.

Its proposals included characterizing Chile as a “plurinational” state, to reflect the multi-ethnic nature of the country, and strengthening the rights of its indigenous peoples, about 13 per cent of the population, by establishing autonomous indigenous territories. It also introduced rights to free education, healthcare and housing. And it prioritized the environment and put climate change centre stage.

On Sept. 4, 2022, a referendum was held on the new constitutional text drafted by this body. Amid historic turnout rates, a crushing majority of Chileans -- 61.82 per cent -- rejected the proposal.

It was a major blow for current President Gabriel Boric, a left-winger elected in the autumn of 2021 who had risen to prominence during the anti-government protests. Boric had tied his fortunes so closely to the new document that the result was seen as a rebuke to his government.

He had lobbied hard for the new document but he acknowledged that the results made it evident the Chilean people “were not satisfied with the constitutional proposal that the convention presented to Chile.” Still, most Chileans seemed to have agreed that the current document, that dates from the Pinochet dictatorship, must change.

Yet this past May 7, in a further slap at Boric, the right-wing Republican Party won a resounding victory at the ballot box in elections for the newly formed 51-member council that was elected to draft the new constitution. To add to Boric’s setback, the Republican Party’s founder, José Antonio Kast, was the man Boric beat for the presidency two years ago.

The plebiscite was the first vote in Chile with compulsory voting and automatic registration, so it was the most in-depth look at the entirety of Chile’s electorate.

The new body has 23 representatives of the Republican Party, eleven from others on the right, and only sixteen from the left (plus one representative of indigenous peoples). And they will probably create a document that will be similar to Pinochet’s old one.

How do we explain the lurch of Chilean society, from left-wing positions and demands for sweeping social reforms, towards the right, in just a few years? Clearly, Chileans were not ready to support a charter that would have been one of the most progressive in the world and would have fundamentally changed the South American nation.

There was a lot at stake in the plebiscite, and fears were stoked among the population, such as anxiety over losing ownership of private pension funds, fear of losing privately owned housing, and concern of the effects of plurinationality, which was presented by its opponents as a dissolution of national identity.

The nation, the left had contended, should be “pluralized” into a series of communities (or “peoples”) rooted in “territories,” thus questioning the constitutive unity of the country itself. This pluralized notion of the state and the nation left a bad taste in people’s mouths: The call for separate local justice systems for indigenous peoples and the replacement of the Senate (one of the oldest in the modern world) by a chamber of regional representation did not go over well.

The 2021 presidential election was an early warning of a major shift in popular sentiment, especially since Kast had won first place in the initial round that November (albeit in a context of high electoral fragmentation) until overtaken by Boric a month later. So in 2023, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that violently ended the democratic socialist experiment of Allende, the left remains in disarray.