Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Emmott
Read between
May 29, 2017 - March 25, 2018
The sense of shared interest that such equality represents has further encouraged societies to choose to make collective provision, through laws or the use of tax revenues, for some “public goods” that are deemed to be of general societal benefit, such as access to
We are, and always will be, unequal in all sorts of ways – income, wealth, talent, profession, personality, social status – but in principle in a Western society we are, or should be, equal in our basic civic rights and in the political voice that this gives us. This equality of
But to be right about the problems does not make you right about the solutions.
what is serious is that they suggest he does not understand the problems he – or any western government – needs to solve.
that its essential virtues are easy to take for granted and even easier to neglect or distort.
Openness, equality and their expression through democracy can, over time, serve to weaken, undermine and potentially destroy their own foundations.
Western countries need to jolt themselves out of their innate complacency, to revisit the essential values that have made them so successful, and to revive and if necessary reinvent them.
The very reason Western societies have survived and thrived is that with openness and equality has come a vital characteristic: the ability to evolve, in the face of new threats and conditions, internally and externally.
The reason is that the Western system proved far more flexible, more evolutionary,
The source of the West’s evolutionary power has been its openness, its equality of rights, and so its social trust.
without openness, the West cannot thrive; but without equality, the West cannot last.
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
The claim by Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front National, that today’s true political contest is one between globalism and patriotism is a firmly tribal one, even if the French tribe is large.
It is not just that she won’t take her own side in the quarrel. She seems unsure which side she is on.
looking for a sense of belonging, identity and personal or religious purpose, even as many millions more have run away from it, looking for safety and freedom.
Power politics still trumps international law.
It is our own failures, within our societies, that have created these problems and feelings, and which pose a bigger, more lasting danger to us than do Islamic State, President Putin, or China,
from errors, pressures and especially interest groups inside our societies and political systems.
They come from our own forms of tribalism and from those tribes’ eternal desire to recreate divisions and destroy social unity.
Instead we need to clean up and repair our democratic and economic systems.
Ironically, those selfish groups and pressures that have become the enemies of democracy and economic freedom are often the beneficiaries and consequences of openness.
A strong West has always been able to cope with a turbulent and troubling world. It is thanks to our frenemies that what we currently have is a weak West.
It is easy to take those societies, and the freedoms and living standards they have brought, for granted.
Margaret Thatcher was fond of saying that “when people are free to choose, they choose
“and when they have had freedom for a long time,
they often forget how lucky they are”.
Today, there is no country that has stayed for a sustained period among the world’s top 25 in terms of overall living standards, as measured by the UN Human Development Index, that has not been open and thus Western,
Those forces distorted or disarmed public policy as a result of the interplay between those interests and politicians and policymakers, sometimes through corruption, sometimes through persuasion and delusion.
long period of success, known to economists as “the great moderation”, generated the complacency that left Western political systems open to such delusion and subversion.
the result simply of faulty policies rather as the wrong settings on a computer might make it crash or the wrong tuning of a racing-car engine could make it stall,
The faith, or at least belief, in constitutionalism and equality before the law can be dated back centuries, to the Magna Carta (in Britain in 1215) or to Roman law and the principles of civis romanus sum
Power often trumped the law,
One of the main problems is that yesterday’s payments to buy social trust do not necessarily deal with today’s or tomorrow’s problems,
An open and equal society cannot survive high “dependency ratios”, for that would institutionalise inequality and produce conflict between payers and receivers.
Whenever the welfare state becomes unfit for that purpose, it needs to be rethought and reinvented
The most problematic sort of inequality now is the sort that generates or is associated with unequal legal and political rights
Pension entitlements are one example,
Most problematic of all is the inequality of political voice and rights that has come most spectacularly and clearly from rises in the wealth of the richest fractions of society and of big corporations.
If such wealth becomes so entrenched that political influence is grossly distorted and all hope of social mobility and advancement through education
becomes blocked, societies will have ceased t...
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If democracy simply means the best politics and policy that a billionaire, a banker or a technology monopolist can buy, democ...
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For it raises the difficult question of how much is too much.
On paper, the argument for immigration is uncontestable,
The genius of democracy is its ability to evolve, to adapt.
One day that stupidity might, he implies, prove democracy’s downfall.
Such decentralised systems exhibit negligence more than overconfidence, carelessness more than complacency.
Much greater harm is done by the natural, but selfish, behaviour of myriad private actors in seeking advantage in the democratic contest, and then succeeding in holding onto it.
Yet it is the winners that make democracy risk failure when they win too well.
Classic political analysis of democracy has for centuries focused on one, albeit vital, aspect of this excess of success: how to deal with the danger of a tyranny of the majority.
Soros’s argument underplays the key weakness, the most deadly trait of democracy: the ability of powerful special interests, some of them commercial and even “market fundamentalist” but many not, to capture and turn to their own advantage laws, regulations and public resources.
