Week 50: Tory Turbulence
Week 50: Tory Turbulence
The Conservative Party's Rwanda bill is less about asylum seekers and more about their own internal emotional problems
In the United Kingdom – especially within the Conservative Party – claiming something is “Australian–style” tends to appeal to a certain type of politician and voter. There are those who feel that anything “Australian” must automatically be “tough” and demonstrating a clear-eye’d common sense. Australia is perceived to be a thoroughly butch country that acts with strength and vigour. With policies that are made by real men for real men.
This is an amusing misreading of a country that is often timid and unambitious (although courage and ambition shouldn’t be read as masculine). However, the latest indication of this influence is on the UK’s asylum policy, and the attempts by the Tory government to export asylum seekers to Rwanda. A policy heavily influenced by – or even mimicking – Australia’s offshore detention policy that sent maritime asylum seekers to Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
One could make the argument that, like Australia’s policy, the threat of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is an act of deterrence – to prevent people from making dangerous maritime crossings. While this may be the public argument it’s not the motivating factor. The policy has been designed to impress those who don’t believe that government should be restrained by either laws, due process or ethical norms. Those who froth with enthusiasm at the prospect of finding some weakling to pick on.
Yet there is also something else going on, reflected in the weekly chaos of UK politics. Something deeper in psychology than just the lusts of bullies. The past decade or so of UK politics has primarily been about the psychodrama within the Conservative Party. Almost every policy idea the party’s leadership has is an attempt to quell some internal party problem, and absolutely none of them are successful. This is because is is impossible to placate those who wish to be permanently agitated.
These elements within the party are the dogs permanently chasing the car, with not only no idea of what to do with it once caught (see Brexit), but actually no intention of catching it at all. The thrill is in the chase. Which is why any policy proposal aimed at satisfying them will always fail – and why many Tories rebelled against the government’s Rwanda proposal for not being harsh enough. Their behaviour is agitation for agitation’s sake – the immaturity of revolutionary fantasy.
There is a deep emotional turbulence that has overwhelmed much of conservative politics throughout the West. The pace of change has left them unmoored and flailing. Something I wrote about as being the consequences of conservative parties’ own economic ideas in The Failure of Fusionism.
I am generally sympathetic to people’s inability to adjust to the pace of change. I believe these upheavals have bred a deep insecurity within us all as human beings which is manifesting itself in a number of different ways (identity-based movements being one). Overcoming this insecurity is difficult and requires empathy.
However, I’m less sympathetic to those who don’t respond to these changes in a mature and responsible manner. Those in positions of power who are chaotic and reckless, and who use other people’s tough circumstances as political footballs. There’s nothing strong or impressive about these attempts at hard-arse politics. As it only creates more of the social insecurity these politicians are emotionally struggling with themselves.
This Week’s Reading:
(a little light this week, apologies)
Derek Thompson – The Atlantic
“The way we talk about the world shapes our experience of the world. In 2022, the researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews write. This can trigger a self-fulfilling spiral: Some individuals who become hyperaware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders may start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which leads them to recoil from social activities and practice other forms of behavioural avoidance, which exacerbates their anxiety.
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.”
Aaron Sarin – Persuasion
“The Party expends huge effort in controlling online sentiment, and it is largely successful. Even today, many Chinese know nothing at all of the Tiananmen Square massacre until they travel overseas—the result of a blanket censorship of any mention of the event. If anti-Semitism proliferates on the internet, we can be certain that the authorities want it there. And they are not merely passive observers. The Party has form when it comes to inventing public opinion.
Once a sentiment like anti-Semitism is sufficiently widespread, then citizens like my misguided acquaintance can be counted on to adopt the new majority opinion, helping the campaign to perpetuate itself. There is plenty of unfocused rage lying around the place in communist China. People are angry, for both political and economic reasons, so the Party diligently finds a target for them: frequently Japan, and lately Israel.”
Hsiao Bi-khim Is Taiwan’s Cat Warrior
Banyan – The Economist
“Before Hsiao Bi-Khim was dispatched to Washington in 2020, she was asked how she would counter China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy. Taiwan’s new de facto ambassador to America said she would be a “cat warrior”. Inspired by her four beloved felines, she would be lovable, nimble and flexible. Cats “can balance themselves in very delicate places”, she tells Banyan. “They tread softly, but they…are able to find the right positions of defence.” What is more, adds Ms Hsiao, who recently returned to Taiwan to contest the election due on January 13th as the vice-presidential candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), cats are independent-minded. “You can’t force them to do things they don’t want to.
Ms Hsiao’s candidacy is a strong signal that the dpp plans to maintain its current posture towards China under William Lai, its presidential candidate and the narrow favourite in the election. Under Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s current president, this has been characterised by avoiding unnecessary provocation, while asserting Taiwanese sovereignty. That is reassuring to America, where Ms Hsiao’s feline outreach won her many friends and admirers, but irritating to China. It has sanctioned Ms Hsiao twice and derides her as an “unyielding separatist”.
Fareed Zakaria – Foreign Affairs
“If the United States reneges on this broad, open, generous vision of the world out of fear and pessimism, it will have lost a great deal of its natural advantages. For too long, it has rationalised individual actions that are contrary to its avowed principles as the exceptions it must make to shore up its own situation and thereby bolster the order as a whole. It breaks a norm to get a quick result. But you cannot destroy the rules-based system in order to save it. The rest of the world watches and learns. Already, countries are in a competitive race, enacting subsidies, preferences, and barriers to protect their own economies. Already, countries violate international rules and point to Washington’s hypocrisy as justification. This pattern unfortunately includes the previous president’s lack of respect for democratic norms. Poland’s ruling party spun Trump-like conspiracy theories after it lost a recent election, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s claims of election fraud drove his supporters to mount a January 6–style attack on his country’s capital.
The most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia, or Iran. It comes from the United States. If America, consumed by exaggerated fears of its own decline, retreats from its leading role in world affairs, it will open up power vacuums across the globe and encourage a variety of powers and players to try to step into the disarray. We have seen what a post-American Middle East looks like. Imagine something similar in Europe and Asia, but this time with great powers, not regional ones, doing the disrupting, and with seismic global consequences. It is disturbing to watch as parts of the Republican Party return to the isolationism that characterised the party in the 1930s, when it resolutely opposed U.S. intervention even as Europe and Asia burned.”
‘We’ll Be at Each Others’ Throats’: Fiona Hill On What Happens If Putin Wins
Maura Reynolds – Politico
“A world in which Putin chalks up a win in Ukraine is one where the U.S.’s standing in the world is diminished, where Iran and North Korea are emboldened, where China dominates the Indo-Pacific, where the Middle East becomes more unstable and where nuclear proliferation takes off, among allies as well as enemies.
“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” she told me. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”
Let’s just put it frankly — this is all about the upcoming presidential election. It’s less about Ukraine and it’s more about the fact that we have an election coming up next year. The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front. People are incapable now of separating off “giving Biden a win” from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.
In that regard, whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”
In the late-1970s, Japanese musician Haruomi Hosono travelled to India. Inspired by the music he heard on the trip, he endeavoured to make a soundtrack to a non-existent Bollywood film. The resulting album, Cochin Moon, is one of the stranger things to come out of the prolific strangeness of Japanese music from the mid-1970s to early-1990s.