I have a dream

Fifty years ago today, on 28th August 1963, Martin Luther King delivered what is arguably the greatest political speech ever made: “I have a dream”.

The text of the speech (with a link to an MP3 audio file) is here.

You can watch a video of the speech here:



Listen and be reminded that politics is capable of a good deal more than today’s pedestrian offerings.

‘Hitler Was A Liberal’

Believe it or not, an American author called Joseph P. Kamp wrote a book called Hitler Was A Liberal, published in 1949 as part of an ultraconservative propaganda campaign organised and financed by the Texan oil billionaire and multiple bigamist H.L. Hunt.

The astonishing story of Hunt’s ultraconservative activities is part of a fascinating blog by TV documentary maker Adam Curtis, which explores the idea that the abuse of language deprives us of much of the freedom and independence we imagine we have.

Curtis credits Hunt with starting the current trend towards corrosion of objectivity and truth in the media. He tells the story of Hunt to illustrate his thesis:

So much of the language that surrounds us – from things like economics, management theory and the algorithms built into computer systems – appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work, and what human beings are really like.

Once again, Adam Curtis has produced a rich and thought-provoking essay, illustrated with some extraordinary video footage. Far superior to the trivia that passes for most political comment these days, it reminds us of the serious themes that politics is really about.

By ’eck, it’s Abe Lincoln

The new Steven Spielberg film Lincoln has no scenes set in Lancashire. Perhaps it should have.

As the BBC’s Paul Mason points out, Lancashire’s cotton workers, urged on by Liberal MP John Bright, expressed solidarity with the Union’s fight against slavery and its blockade of the south, despite losing work from the resulting loss of cotton supplies.

Lincoln is commemorated by a statue in a square named after him in Manchester:

At a mass meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, on New Year's Eve 1862, attended by a mixture of cotton workers, and the Manchester middle class, they passed a motion urging Lincoln to prosecute the war, abolish slavery and supporting the blockade – despite the fact that it was by now causing them to starve. The meeting convened despite an editorial in the Manchester Guardian advising people not to attend.

Mr Lincoln, in a letter dated 19 January 1863, 150 years ago... replied with the words that are inscribed on his statue:

“I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.

“It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom… Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.”

Why the Tea Party is breaking apart

On Three Worlds (the campaignstrategy.org blog), Chris Rose reports an analysis by Pat Dade showing that America’s right-wing Tea Party (the Republican party-within-a-party) consists of two very different wings, libertarians and religious conservatives. Antagonism between these two groups is causing a sharp drop in support.

The two groups have very different values:

The Libertarians... scored highly on power, achievement, pleasure and self-direction, whereas the Religious Conservatives scored highly on benevolence, tradition, propriety and security.

What unites them is narrow: a rejection of fairness and universalism (a belief in the universality of the human experience and a consequent belief in human unity and solidarity). It is perverse that what unites them is opposition to values that are central to Christianity.

The Three Worlds post ends by noting that the differences between Britain’s two coalition parties are just as great, but this misses a more pertinent point: the division within the Conservative Party. Since the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, a more libertarian group primarily concerned with market forces and individualism has supplanted a more traditional group primarily concerned with upholding tradition and community. So much so that it is questionable whether the Conservative Party can any longer be accurately described as a ‘conservative’ party.

Junk economics

It is unfashionable in the internet age to recommend that anyone should read a 10,000-word essay. But in this instance, it is worth putting away childish things and appreciating the art of deferred gratification.

The so-called ‘Fiscal Cliff’ has prompted Michael Hudson to analyse why America’s economy (and therefore the world’s) is in such a mess. And the basic reason is a problem familiar to Liberals for well over a century: rent seeking. In this instance, it is the self-interest of the banking and financial sector, justified by the ‘junk economics’ promoted by Wall Street’s lobbyists:

Today’s central financial problem is that the banking system lends mainly for rent extraction opportunities rather than for tangible capital investment and economic growth to raise living standards. To maximize rent, it has lobbied to untax land and natural resources. At issue in today’s tax and financial crisis is thus whether the world is going to have an economy based on progressive industrial democracy or a financialized and polarizing rent-extracting society.

and:

We are experiencing the end of a myth, or at least the end of an Orwellian rhetorical patter talk, about what free markets really are. They are not free if they are to pay rent-extractors rather than producers to cover the actual costs of production. Financial markets are not free if fraudsters are not punished for writing fictitious junk mortgages and paying ratings agencies to sell “opinions” that their clients’ predatory finance is sound wealth creation. A free market needs to be regulated from fraud and from rent seeking.

In other words, Wall Street (and its equivalents in the City of London and elsewhere) is creating a rentier economy and has become little more than a parasite on the productive economy. And Michael Hudson should know; he’s a Wall Street financial analyst.

Gosh! You mean grassroots campaigning actually works?

In the Boston Globe, Michael Kranish analyses the story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in this year’s presidential election campaign.

Amid a catalogue of errors, one mistake will stand out for most British Liberal Democrats:

Rich Beeson [one of Romney’s political directors] ...said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.

One-to-one contact with voters? No kidding.

Admittedly, the Obama campaign’s grassroots techniques were somewhat more sophisticated than your average British local by-election operation:

Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget” voters and a sophis­ticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.

Nevertheless, the basic case for grassroots campaigning remains the same. A shame it was not understood by the Liberal Democrat leadership in the 2010 general election.

Nick Clegg elbowed Chris Rennard aside and installed a group of advertising and PR people to run the party’s campaign. These people had no serious experience of political campaigning but believed this did not matter. They were convinced that a ‘ground war’ (i.e. grassroots campaigning) was more or less redundant and that the Liberal Democrat campaign could rely on an ‘air war’ (i.e. a nationwide marketing campaign). The success of the first televised leaders’ debate and the ensuing ‘Cleggmania’ served only to reinforce their prejudices. When on polling day, support collapsed like a soufflé, they had no idea why.

Of course, general election campaigns (or any other nationwide campaign) cannot be conducted solely via a ‘ground war’ but require a judicious mix of ground and air tactics. But as voters become more individualised in their outlook, more consumer-savvy and more sceptical about politics, they will need and expect more human contact, not less.

20 astounding gun ads

Last week’s shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, have once again raised the question of reform to America’s lax gun laws.

“We can’t tolerate this any more. These tragedies must end and to end them we must change,” President Obama told a prayer vigil in Newtown.

Presumably Obama plans some sort of reform, although he has not yet made any specific proposals. Paul Krugman suggests that reform is easier than most people imagine. I am not so sure.

Unlike in Britain, where the killings in Hungerford and Dunblane made legal reform popular, America’s gun culture is deeply embedded. It is not just the constitutional ‘right to bear arms’ or the lobbying power of the National Rifle Association, but also a lingering frontier mentality.

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik despairs of America’s gun lobby:

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value.

Meanwhile, America’s gun culture continues to leave the rest of the world puzzled. These 20 astounding gun ads can only add to our puzzlement.

Don’t you wish more politicians spoke like this?

If you want evidence that politics has been hollowed out, consider the language many politicians use.

It has an other-worldly quality. It sounds scripted and insincere, not real or human. It is dishonest, but in a more subtle way than downright lies, relying instead on various forms of evasion: chicanery, obfuscation, weasel words, circumlocution, euphemism, platitudes, jargon and clichés.

It is the over-engineered and debased language of spin doctors and ‘messaging’. It is a language drained of meaning; surface not substance, marketing not politics.

(This problem is not new; George Orwell was complaining about politicians’ abuse of language in 1946).

And the irony is that, the more politicians try to gratify public opinion by contriving this sort of language, the less it works. Politicians are responding to what polls and focus groups tell them people want to hear. But the resulting language actually lowers popular trust in politicians because it sounds phoney.

So it is refreshing to hear a politician speak from the heart in real language. Steve Yolland reports:

In Michigan, the Republican-controlled legislature succeeded in passing a new ‘right-to-work’ law, which weakens unions’ ability to negotiate and has serious negative implications for all workers in the state. They had no public meetings, no debate, no time for review, and most offensively had Republican staffers sit in seats in the gallery to block interested citizens from even being in the room to hear about it.

Representative Brandon Dillon (Democrat) decided to speak out against this abuse of power. And this is what he said:



Don’t you wish more politicians spoke like that?

How the mighty are fallen

I hadn’t realised how bad things were for the Republican Party, following its defeat in last month’s US presidential election, until I visited a remaindered book shop yesterday.

There, I found a book by Karl Rove (former adviser to President George W. Bush and now a conservative pundit on Fox News) – reduced to 50p.

It reminds me of this poem.