Week 43: Command and Control
Week 43: Command and Control
The new U.S Speaker's strange predilection, and why it says far more about the world than may immediately appear
With the Republican Party in the United States finally ending their internal meltdown by electing a new Speaker of the House of Representatives, the media this week were scrambling to try and identify what this previously fairly anonymous man thinks. This has led to the discovery that Mike Johnson doesn’t much like the concept of divorce, and in particular the no-fault divorce laws which were legislated mostly in the 1970s.
These are laws that enabled women the greater ability to escape from abusive marriages and approach the world with more independence than they previously had. Many men – including the new U.S Speaker – find this unacceptable. And Johnson’s own state of Louisiana is considering eliminating these laws.
This hostility towards no-fault divorce has been building for some time. I’ve made the argument in The Best Interests Of The Abuser that the legal strategy of “parental alienation” used in family courts developed as a response to no-fault divorce. This concept has been ruse developed to try and pretend that protecting male household authority wasn’t actually the driving force behind custody disputes. However, now many men are simply being overt about it. The modern media environment’s incentivising of edgier and edgier opinions means there’s now no longer any room for subtlety.
Why this is important beyond just a concern for women trapped in abusive relationships is that both domestic and global stability is dependant on men being about to cope with – or ideally celebrate – women’s advancement. Male resentment is not only a problem for women and girls, but find any form of instability in the world – regardless of the issues that ostensibly drive it – and you will find resentful men mired in a myriad of grievances. Potentially some grievances are justified, but a lust to control women is always in the mix.
The relationship between authoritarian psychology and household violence is something I wrote about in Our Reckoning With Machismo after Russia’s escalation of its invasion of Ukraine.
It’s always been amusing to me that the justification for previously not allowing women to vote, or preventing women from obtaining political power, was on the grounds that women were too emotional to be responsible. Our current Age of Insecurity is being built quite clearly on the turbulence of men’s emotions, and the tantrums they are throwing.
Newsletter Update
Now that I’m settled back in Melbourne, there’s a pipeline of essays that I hope to published before the end of the year. These will be on a variety of topics but hopefully they will be of interest to readers – these will include some further thoughts on Australia’s recent referendum and why progressives struggle to communicate with the broader public; why, rather than constantly going on about proportional representation on their podcast, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart should consider preferential voting for the UK instead; and given that I constantly claim the left-right spectrum is useless and needs to be burnt to the ground I should probably explain why. And maybe I’ll try to ambitiously tackle the Age of Insecurity I mentioned above.
I’m signposting these here in order to commit to getting them written.
This Week’s Reading
Carl Minzner – Asia Unbound
“In his address to delegates, Politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang notably omitted a phrase about male-female equality that has been a fixture of leaders' addresses to the Women's Congress for decades. Since the 1990s, top Party officials have regularly reiterated at each meeting of the Congress that "equality between men and women is a fundamental national policy of the Chinese government”—a formulation initially adopted by Jiang Zemin in 1995. That language is now gone, as are the corresponding sweeping statements regarding the role of the Party in ensuring gender equality in legal rights or economic opportunity – present in similar addresses dating back to the 1990s.
At the same time, Ding emphasized in his remarks that Chinese women should "study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Culture" and "establish a correct outlook on marriage and love, childbirth and family." Such language goes well beyond anything seen in prior Party addresses. This focus aligns with recent moves by the Party to more actively promote traditional gender roles and increased birth rates as solutions to China's demographic challenges.”
Dean Phillips Has A Warning For Democrats
Tim Alberta – The Atlantic
“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”
This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.
Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.
What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.
Why Smart Leaders Do Stupid Things
Keren Yarhi-Milo – Foreign Affairs
“There was a time when Mearsheimer and Rosato’s beliefs would have been conventional wisdom, or at least quite popular, among scholars of international relations. For much of the twentieth century, “realism”—a theory made broadly popular by figures such as Kenneth Waltz, Henry Kissinger, and George Kennan—dominated the discourse. Realist scholars believe that states behave according to the same, inexorable logic. They behave rationally, working to maximize their power and protect themselves from attack in an anarchic world. To these experts, the psychology of leaders mattered little. It was the shape, contour, and distribution of power of international systems that dictated how states behaved.
But over the last several decades, the field has seen a quiet revolution. Political scientists began studying how leaders think, what biases they hold, and how these characteristics shape decision-making. They found that, overwhelmingly, psychology has an enormous effect on leaders’ behavior on the international stage. Leaders frequently rely on heuristics to make choices—especially during crises. Leaders’ beliefs, their personalities, and their impressions of their peers influence how they see the world. And their feelings shape how they approach different problems and situations. Putin’s emotional fixation on controlling Ukraine, for example, is frequently cited as the reason he invaded the country.”
Graeme Wood – The Atlantic
“The ISIS objection to Hamas on these grounds is deep: Merely acknowledging that there is something called the Palestinian people, and they might live in a Palestinian state owned by Palestinians, rather than by Muslims in general, is enough for ISIS to condemn Hamas’s followers as nationalists and infidels. The first leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, promised that his soldiers’ boots “will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature.”
Cole Bunzel of the Hoover Institution, an authority on jihadist factions, wrote last year that ISIS’s leaders have treated the Palestine issue as a distraction from the theological and apocalyptic issues they consider primary. Muslims, one ISIS article claimed, had treated the liberation of Palestine as an “idol,” and failed to notice that “the apostate Hamas movement” was a bunch of polytheists. The researcher Tore Refslund Hamming summarized ISIS’s initial reaction to Hamas’s attack, and it remains in line with these views. It scolds Hamas for its alliances with apostates and Shia. It takes exception to Hamas’s respect for borders, insisting that attacks should be global.”
Daniel Callcut – Aeon
“The fact of moral diversity therefore raises the issue of moral relativism. This, too, has become a part of the culture wars, especially as these debates have played out in the United States. Many moral traditions are based on the idea that there are universal values, perhaps rooted in human nature. Perhaps you yourself were raised with the universalist idea that there is a single true morality that applies to everyone, everywhere. But if living many different ethical ways of life is natural to human beings, then this encourages the idea that humans create multiple ethical worlds, and that ethical truth is relative to the world in question. Moral truth, like the truth about etiquette, simply varies from place to place. So far, so bad, for universalism.
When battles over moral relativism have featured in the culture wars, they tend to be framed in the following way. One side of the argument celebrates cultural diversity and unites this with an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of values. This is the outlook popularly associated with postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of universalist tradition. However, this seemingly ‘relativistic’ destination is precisely what alarms the moral conservative. Hence the other side of the culture wars: if there is no common human standard upon which to ground moral universalism, then something beyond the human is needed. This is the side of the culture wars associated with the need to return to religion, and a morally reactionary response to social diversity.
These debates about the sources of morality have become part of mainstream culture. The old-school secular humanist, faced with the difficulty of finding a universal basis for a human-centred morality, is presented with a dilemma: either choose a culture-centred ethics, or return to a God-centred one. Call it the anti-Humanist Fork: relativism or religion? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, recently stated in the New Statesman magazine that ‘The modern humanist is likely to be a far more passionate defender of cultural variety than their predecessors.’ What he didn’t dwell upon is the following irony: that proper recognition of moral diversity has tended to undermine the universalism upon which humanism is typically founded.”
Anthea Roberts – Foreign Affairs
“Transforming in the face of shocks is even more radical. It involves making more permanent structural changes that either reduce exposure and vulnerability to risks or increase the ability to capture rewards. Whereas adaptation can be achieved through incremental adjustments that largely preserve the status quo, transformation involves dramatic change to a new and better state. COVID-19 vaccines enabled governments to transform their response to the pandemic, fundamentally changing the risk-reward calculus for lockdowns and allowing countries to open their economies. Clean energy will prove even more transformative in the future. Governments will be able to use green technology to remake their economies in response to climate change.
These three modes of resilience—absorption, adaptation, and transformation—can operate alone or in combination. Often, they work on different timelines. For example, when China abruptly cut off exports of rare-earth elements to Japan in 2010 amid tensions in the East China Sea, Japan used all three modes of resilience to minimize harm. In the short term, it used careful inventory management to absorb the initial shock of the disruption and stretch existing supplies as far as possible. In the medium term, it adapted by recycling old rare-earth elements and finding substitutes for them. And in the long term, it took advantage of a transformation in the market for rare-earth minerals as new mines opened outside China.”
Marriage Has Been Divorced From Love
Kat Rosenfield – Unherd
“Progressives tend to cite women’s liberation and the rise of non-heterosexual couplings as positive factors fuelling the decline in marriage rates; less discussed but perhaps equally salient is the contemporary sense that marriage is square and stodgy and hence incompatible with the carefree state of perpetual adolescence in which it is now possible to live long after reaching the age of majority. Millennials aren’t even having midlife crises at the same rate as previous generations, at least in part because they aren’t settling into marriage, parenthood, home ownership — in short, into the kind of commitments that trigger existential dread about the road not taken.
Of course, every entry into this debate — including this one, at least up until this moment — tends to ignore the practical issues that prevent people from getting married. Some of this, like the unaffordability of housing, is an economic problem. But some of it, I think, is fear. The fear of growing up, and getting old. The fear of doing something so serious it can’t be easily undone or written off as a childish error. The fear of building a whole entire world with another person, and all the terrible vulnerability that entails — a vulnerability which has always been scary, but perhaps particularly so for a generation that equates emotional discomfort with being unsafe.”
There’s no playlist again this week. Going forward playlists may become periodic depending on my available time, but I will provide at least something to listen to each week.
Given the stresses of the current era, it might be nice to take a few minutes to drift back in time with some 1980s Japanese ambient music. This is a gorgeous (and maybe slightly spooky) piece from Takashi Kokubo.