En français dans le texte: la réforme universitaire commentée:

Voici, finalement un petit "post" en français - je vais peut-être m'y mettre, qui sait?

Comme être malade laisse pas mal de temps libre, je lis beaucoup, sur le net - et voici que j'ai trouvé plein de petites choses intéressantes de mon ancien maître, Marcel Gauchet...

Alors, Gauchet a toujours les mêmes vertus, et les mêmes tares: côté vertus, une intelligence rare, un esprit capable de construire de vastes théories, et une causticité de premier ordre - les tares, un débit très monotone, une certaine capacité à se prendre trop au sérieux, et bien trop de foi dans les théories qu'il échafaude...

Quelques suggestions de lecture et d'écoute, donc:

- le "blog" tenu par (un de?) ses disciple(s) - pas vraiment un blog, plutôt une page publicitaire, mais quelques liens intéressants - just un peu choquant quand on compare aux intellectuels américains qui, eux, tiennent leur propre blog! allez voir celui de Robert Reich pour comparer...

- beaucoup plus intéressant, son "cours" à l'EHESS sur la réforme universitaire que le Gouvernement essaie d'imposer - vaut vraiment le coup d'être écouté, même si le débit monotone rend ça un peu soporifique par moments... Bien entendu, Gauchet choisit les faits qui l'arrangent et exclut ceux qu'il ne veut pas voir, mais dans l'ensemble ça se tient assez bien

- très stimulant, et beaucoup plus court, un papier sur la désorientation de la gauche (pas seulement en France) - pour une fois, la théorie n'est pas complète, mais en tout cas ça réveille...

A bientôt!

Link exchange - on GDP, left and right...

A few things I recommend reading:

A lot of good stuff from Matthew Yglesias some thinking on the issue of growth, resource allocation etc. Brings back to the issue that GDP measurement is awfully inadequate - maybe, since there is no better single indicator, we should start tracking a combination of indicators?? (like GDP, health data, income distribution, GDP composition etc.) - and also a nice post on health care...


And from the Dish on prohibition - reminding us that the desire to modify the other is not only from the right, but also from the left...

Enjoy!

Left and right - alternate edit

Here is the original version of my post on left and right, which I had lost...some few additional ideas, so I just post it too...

First, let me link again to this excellent description in Secular Conservative:

The Secular Left asks, why not?
The Secular Right asks, why?
The Religious
Left demands that we should, “Because god wills it!”
The Religious Right
asserts that we can’t, “Because god forbids it!”

Brilliant. Reminds me that in my opinion the pre-Enlightenment thinkers, in particular Montaigne and Pascal, were real temperamental conservatives: they could see all the evil with the status quo, but thought efforts to change it would likely make things worse. Many, but not all, Enlightenment thinkers thought the world could be improved, easily...Some were more realistic, in particular Voltaire: he cared, but was highly sceptical too...



Here is the post itself - sorry, not edited:



What are left and right? One of the smartest accounts of it is certainly Marchel Gauchet’s in the Lieux de Memoire, t.1 – unfortunately not available on line… In a nutshell, both are a lot about identity, memory, emotional links to one side or the other. One comes from a “left” or “right” family. In Italy, I have even seen this partly linked with and/or replicated by attachment to a football team. One supports the Roma or Lazio because grandfather did – and often this means also that one supported the Communists, or the (Neo-)fascists, etc. So, left and right as identity markers, taking partly over from the village, or religion, etc., in a time of urbanization and secularisation.
What might left and right otherwise really mean, in terms of politics and ideology. Two ways to approach this: “temperament”, or precise ideological contents. I tend to think temperament makes more sense (see in secular conservative the summary). Here is why: ideology-wise, what was left became right, and now maybe the opposite may become true…
Ever since the French Revolution occurred, and the terms made their debut, there has been a “race to the left”, or a gradual entry into the mainstream of ideas that were first thought revolutionary, but then were pushed “rightwards” by the emergence of more “progressive” ideas. This movement was essentially driven by the left becoming the party of “equality” rather than “liberty” (not necessarily against liberty, but with more emphasis on equality). This analysis is best seen in Furet- La Revolution Francaise.
There has always been a tension, however, and a return movement too. As the left became more associated with promoting/protecting certain social categories, it took a certain “corporatist” character, that was more in keeping with what the right had been in the early days of the French Revolution. This is not just a recent evolution, but one that was visible in the second part of the 19th century already.
Some transfers of ideas from left to right (or vice-versa) were also not just the result of the emergence of more radical proposals, and the “natural” push of previous radicalism “rightwards” as a result, but of a real “takeover” of ideas by the other side. This is most famously the case of nationalism which, while introduced in the Revolutionary times by the left (i.e. the Revolutionary movement), was taken over fully and with enthusiasm by the (far) right, and became a fantastic driver for it, in the late 19th century – and onwards, forever as it seems.
Interestingly, one could have assumed that, since the extremes of both left and right had demonstrated their essential similarity in results in the 1930s, the understanding of the misleading nature of left and right as ideologies would be understood. The Cold War, however, prevented this – but on what ideological delusion was it supported?
> some real issues: colonies, foreigners, sex, change?? Culture??
> Poverty/ what to do about it?
> Temperament
> At the end – Montaigne/Pascal/jansenistes vs. Lumieres (but maybe not all of them? Voltaire as right-wing libertarian or not even – conservative??) – in fact drawn both to the realism of the first and their attention to perverse unexpected consequences AND to the world changing enthusiasm of the 2nd (because otherwise nothing ever happens)

immigrants

So Sarkozy won because he bashed immigrants. And he still does bash them, as much as he can. Small gestures, hunt every day. Expelling hundreds, thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians in the last month before they joined the EU (and returned legally, after a trip home courtesy of the French taxpayers) just to inflate numbers. Increasing several times over a couple of years the number of years spouses of French citizens have to wait until they become French. And who opposes this? No one it seems.

But why? If the left is the party of the poor, and/or the party of equality, it has a duty to defend the immigrants, which generally are the poorest. It also has a duty to support immigration, because what makes wages so low in poor countries and makes "offshoring" jobs so easy, is that capital can move (which is GOOD, it means poor countries can go out of poverty!) but labour cannot (which is BAD - it means capital has a much stronger negotiating position). If labour could move more freely, wages would go up faster in poorer countries. This is exactly what happened in Eastern Europe since it joined the EU, contrary to what paranoid French afraid of the "plombier polonais" thought...

Well, all this are idealistic reasons. Don't expect anyone to act on them. So what, let's turn to pure power politics. France has long had one of the most "liberal" (precisely, etimologically) citizenship regimes around - if you are born here, you are French. So France has millions of French citizens of (recent) foreign origin. They could easily turn around elections the way blacks did for Barack Obama in many places...But no one bothers to talk to them! Just as any other poorer and generally less educated and less influential minority, they vote less than average. And no one is trying to organize them, mobilize them. No wonder the left has written off so many cities with large immigrant populations, which instead elect solidly far-right mayors (either officially far-right, or de facto). How dumb are our political elites, I wonder?

On reality denial - the French Left

It could seem that my "transatlantic" focus is rather one way if I continue talking only about American politics...no worries!

[This post was started a couple of days ago and not finished...so it might look a bit old to French readers, but not so to others...]

The French Left has recently been giving a particularly absurd show - but unfortunately this has deep roots, and is not mere aberration. Looking at what befell the candidates for Socialist Party leadership is enlightening.



The Socialists just went through several months of campaigning, and finally an election by the party members, for their "General Secretary", i.e. party leader. Many things were weird:

-> A bit over 50% of card-carrying party members voted - so the leader was elected by maybe a total of 60,000 votes or so. The Socialists are a party that typically will aim at getting from 6 to 12 million votes or so in a general election - not much of a primary, really!

-> One of the frontrunners, the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe, narrowly got pushed out after the first round, after having been an early frontrunner. Delanoe's sin: he expressed in June his identity as "a socialist and a liberal" (the latter being in France understood generally as "free-market fanatic", which is not how he meant it of course). Given the general hyper-statist mood (financial crisis...), this clearly cost him a lot.



-> The two ladies who made it to the second round, Martine Aubry (the eventual winner by a handful of votes) and Segolene Royal (who was not a good loser, once again) fought bitterly and appeared to be rather from enemy camps than from the same party. What was weird was their political positioning:

> Aubry positioned herself as a "true left" believer, a kind of "historical socialism" stalwart - although she is the daughter of previous European Commission President Jacques Delors, of centre-left democrat-christian fame, and herself an able technocrat with a history of close relations with business circles. She was supported by the absurd (let's not say "unlikely" - this is not "unlikely" but clearly absurd!) alliance of the eurosceptic/old left wing of the party, and the clearly "social-liberal" (as we say in France) side of it (whose leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, could not run because he is heading the IMF...).

> As usual it would be difficult to say exactly what Segolene Royal stood for but she was arguably a combination of "more to the left" (popular participation is her great topic, as opposed to decisions coming from the top) and "more to the right" (a liking for law and order topics and, most importantly it seems, a professed openness to maybe one day discuss the possibility of talking to the Centre in order to consider some kind of "let's not call it an alliance but..."). The latter (readiness to talk to the Centre) was attacked by her internal opponents in pretty much the way the US neocons attacked Obama for his professed openness to maybe talk possibly one day to adversaries of the US. Seems the neocons are not the only absolute morons around.


So, in short, the leardership election was won "to the left", and through a vote involving a handful of card-carriers. And what does this "left" mean?

Marcel Gauchet in Lieux de Memoire has analyzed "left" and "right" not anymore like what they pretend to be, but as identities. As such, it does not matter so much what ideologies they cover, but rather whom you belong to. In this sense, they are still valid: there are still people who relate to them, and are convinced to be right...But what does this mean, except for this identity, which could be a secular, urban replacement of the old religious and village identification...?

Francois Furet in his books on the French Revolution showed how, starting from the Revolution onwards, what had once been the "left" of ideas and parties (and politicians) got constantly pushed to the "right" by the emergence of more revolutionary, further "left" ideas and movements. The criteria of being "more revolutionary" being to be for more equality - not more liberty.

I guess we have arrived at the point where we have gone full circle. Some ideas have been going from left to right, then back and forth - such as nationalism, the engine of the Revolution, then later in the 19th century becoming the source of a major right wing movement - and now? are not many defenders of the nation-state, again, on the left? The left never really was the party of the movement, is it still the party of equality?

Probably there is a lot to gain in trying to understand "left" and "right" as temperaments: "why not" against "why", "it could get better" vs. "it could get worse". But it is doubtful whether the French left even still matches this description, and it is Sarkozy's strength to have understood it: most of the left speaks only of preserving, conserving, defending...Not much optimism that things could get better!

Now, why did I name this post "reality denial"? Because the current state of affairs of the left in France is:
- a strong (both through public presence and votes) far-left movement that is against "capitalism", markets, globalization, private property, name it (and which is partly "alternative", i.e. ecological, libertarian in social issues - but only partly so)
- a mainstream socialist party, which is led by graduates of public administration, with a significant training in economics and international relations, but apparently pretend to be some communist operatives from the fifites...I mean, seriously, this is what they talk about:
-> globalization is BAD BAD BAD - just ask the millions of Chinese, Indians and others who escaped poverty in the past twenty years what they think? but never mind, it seems equality is meant only for French state employees??
-> markets are REALLY EVIL - never mind that the left wing governments under President Mitterrand did probably more market friendly reforms than the right, and that, unsurprisingly, combined as it was with reinforced (but "traditional French", one could say) public investments and planning, it worked, with France enjoying a very good time in the nineties, with strengthened competitiveness and a modernized country
-> more more more regulation is GOOD - no one even dares talk about reducing bureaucracy and red tape. Any "deregulation" is just evil - full stop - move over.

Now, this really sounds like a party that is ready to govern in the 21th century, doesn't it? Flatly deny the tremendous positive changes that globalization has brought for such a large share of the world's poor (sorry, just count how many there are in China and India, who recently went out from poverty!). Deny the accomplishments of the governments you ran and the obvious merits of focusing the state on where it can do most good, and let the market decide of resource allocation. As if we had not had enough experience of governments (left and right) throwing billions of dollars at: steel (ended up downsizing and globalizing anyway), shipbuilding (ended up with the only shipyard remaining open being the one that was clearly competitive from the start), computers (ended up wiped away anyway), banks (anyone remembers how much state-owned Credit Lyonnais lost for the taxpayers!?)... And finally, always proposing just more more more more rules?! You must be kidding...?
But then, there is the right...

Giving thanks to whom?

I loved this secularist conservative/libertarian take on Thanksgiving:

The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.

And let me point to a few more posts on this brilliant blog, that proves that the American right is not yet entirely brain dead:

- on creationist nonsense:

...evolution is one of those things where I have a very high degree of certitude as to whether it is true or not, such that I feel ridiculous wasting my finite life discussing its truth or not.

- on left and right definitions:

The Secular Left asks, why not?

The Secular Right asks, why?

The Religious Left demands that we should, “Because god wills it!”

The Religious Right asserts that we can’t, “Because god forbids it!”

If the secular right defines itself this way, along Montaigne's tradition, then it makes sense to read what they write...

Political spectrum

"Obama is a socialist" -
now that he has been elected (and he has picked his economic team), we could laugh about this statement. But let's rather pick it apart:

(1) it means that "socialist" is an insult - interesting from Europe where pretty much every country is or has been governed in recent years by a socialist or social-democratic party...

(2) it means that, for many, any attempt at having the State provide some sort of health coverage for all and/or some kind of redistribution is "socialism" - which just indicates a very wide understanding of words indeed

(3) it illustrates the difficulty of communicating political debates across the Atlantic - some of the issues:

• the Republican party is now so far "right" that many of its members would not even be accepted in "mainstream" extreme-right/neo-fascist parties in Europe - they would have to go to the "lunatic fringe" of the splitter-microparties. Say, Sarah Palin. Why? because no one remotely electable in Europe would stand for creationism - put in another way: no one would vote for a creationist!
• the political discourse in the US is still defined at least in part by "fear of the reds", even though 1917 and the Cold War are long past - the only other country where I can think of something partly similar (on the right only) is Italy (but obviously with very different roots)
• at the same time, the US sees, and has seen, massive State intervention in the economy, and everyone wants more, or nearly everyone!

Now, Obama probably would sit somewhere on the centre-right in most European countries, simply because the political field is in a different place altogether. But, lest you think this means you can just say Europe is more to the "left" or America to the "right" - where do you expect the next Prime Minister or President to be black???

[and, a wink to despairing French leftists, where do you get real primaries to choose your leader?]

But this leads us neatly to the car industry, I guess?