Losing sight of the progress of the world while obsessing over the rearguard actions of the establishment

Two excellent points in The Most Important News Story Right Now Isn’t Impeachment, It’s The Crisis In Mexico by John Daniel Davidson.

The establishment parties, especially the Democrats and the mainstream media, are prioritizing the struggle for power in the US over reporting on real world events which are far more consequential. And the second point being the increasing number of countries around the world which are struggling to fulfill basic governance roles.

To the first point here in the US. There is a way to view this monomaniacal focus on Russia Collusion and Impeachment Hysteria. After nearly four decades of effective control of the federal government and frequent control of the White House, the Democratic Party, since the 1990s, the Democratic Party has faced a steady erosion of political power across the nation.

This erosion reached an apogee under the Obama administration when rule by fiat contributed to a loss of more than a thousand Democratic offices in states and the federal government and the virtual decimation of their leadership bench. It is why the leadership of the party now rests in the shaky hands of a cabal of septuagenarians and octogenarians. A disproportionate number of those now winning office are radical socialists, anti-semites, and/or straight-up racist totalitarians.

That said, the Democratic Socialists and racist totalitarians are, blessedly, still a minority of Democrats. But certainly the loudest. And they are the best for mainstream coverage. It is not exactly ignored that the great bulk of Democratic wins in the 2018 elections were by centrist moderate Democrats. Not ignored, but certainly under-reported. I would wager there are more stories on AOC (Democratic Socialist) alone in the mainstream media than the total for all other, non-radical, freshmen Democratic Senators and Representatives combined.

For Democrats these are existential times. They used to be a big tent representative of all America and in response to the rise of Republicans over the past three decades, they have chosen to narrow their elective appeal. Possibly this is a winning strategy but it has hard to see it as so.

For the mainstream media, these are the end-times. Technology and regulatory change have put their old monopolistic model in deep jeopardy. The internet and a connected world have placed their bottomline in peril. The faster they lose readers and viewers, the more they dip into the red, the more they align with the Democratic Party. The mainstream media and the Democratic Party as we know them are in deep trouble and sympathetically respond collaboratively to the shared threat of irrelevance.

This explains their common desperation in the face of a Trump. I see Trump as a symptom and not as a primary cause. Centrist America first put the establishment (both parties and the mainstream media) on notice in the 2000s with the emergence of the Tea Party, focused on constraining government power by constraining deficit spending. An inchoate self-organizing and collective action against the interests of the Mandarin Class. The Mandarin Class, and especially the media did their assassins job of mischaracterization and denigration. The Mandarin Class prevailed against the movement but not without having to make some changes.

Republicans, partly as a consequence of the Tea Party and partly as a response to Newt Gingrich's earlier Contract With America reforms, has become a dramatically bigger tent party than it was. It has an evolving pipeline of young talent. It has moved far beyond its traditional suburban base. It has established an increasing base in geographical regions in which it had been a relict at best.

Whether they truly represent a majority of American values is a fine debate. They are more representative than they were and possibly more responsive to the electorate, but they are still an entity obsessed with power, frequently willing to sacrifice principle.

The long glide path to nichedom and marginality for Democrats and mainstream media does not seem to have reversed itself. The collapse of the Russia Collusion fabulism was a setback. The anemia of the impeachment hearings may also eventually be similarly seen as a reverse.

But the unintended consequence of all this is to undermine public trust in our government institutions and processes. As Davidson points out, it has crowded out government focus on very real and very present threats to public safety.

From the political establishment there is virtually no attention being paid to the loss of life of 100,000 Americans each year due to drug overdoses and to suicide. There is little attention being paid to the unravelling of Mexico as a nation state of 130 million right next door to us.

The only attention being paid to these events are as a cudgel for political bashing rather reporting on possible constructive actions which are costing American lives and impoverishing our most vulnerable Americans. It is beyond tragic, it is morally outrageous.

The second important point Davidson makes is more of an allusion.

It is worth stepping back to see the broader decadal global progress of the world.

It has been perfectly clear since 1990, that the model of capitalism, global trade, universal human rights and representative democracy married together are a powerful elixir of well-being. Since the fall of the most iconic symbol of totalitarianism, the Berlin Wall, the world has become richer, less unequal, environmentally cleaner, more prosperous and longer lived. The Age of Enlightenment principles have rendered an achievement unequalled in history or by any other set of principles.

That very flood of wealth and prosperity has enabled establishment parties around the world to enrich themselves, ignore their peoples, and turn away from serving the commonweal.

Communism, socialism, fascism, dictatorships are increasingly rare because of their increasingly transparent failures.

Some of the newly emerging Age of Enlightenment principled nations have done astonishingly well while others have struggled, especially with corruption, occasionally with regionalism, but they have all progressed.

It is easy to become micro-absorbed in the quotidian ebbs and flows. Russia is not a functioning democracy. It is a kleptocratic oligopoly. That is a disappointment and a tragedy. But it is a member of the global brotherhood of nations, it is involved in trade, it does provide some platforms for personal achievement, it does have nascent interests from its citizens to reform and advance. It is not prosperous like an OECD country but it is dramatically better off than the USSR in 1989.

China's unique blend of free market economy and totalitarian political control has been the greatest challenge to global progress because it has been delivering increasing prosperity while also clearly demonstrating the sustainability of totalitarianism. That was always theoretically possible and it has to be acknowledge that they have, with their market reforms, released half a billion or more from poverty and drudgery.

But it has always also been the case that there are real concerns whether a large nation, under select totalitarian control can simultaneously have open markets and unrepresentative governance over a longer period of time. You can make it work in the near term but can you resolve the inherent conflicts in the longer term.

For a freer economy to continue to grow, people need greater freedoms than are permitted under the totalitarian system. China's governance model faces its greatest threats not from other nations heir to the Classical Liberal tradition. The greatest threat to its hybrid system of free markets and totalitarian governance comes from the rising expectations of its citizenry.

The wins have been real but the game isn't played out. To a classical liberal mindset, it is merely a matter of time. Eventually the system will have to reform or collapse. We all pray for reform. Hong Kong, Tibet, and the Uyghurs of western China are mere harbingers of the tension between partial freedom and Orwellian totalitarianism. It is by no means certain whether or when reform or decline into factionalism will occur but it is clear that one or the other will happen eventually.

Everywhere across the world, we are seeing reform and growth. Fitful, occasionally bloody. But eventually progressing.

Even among the hardcore holdouts of totalitarianism, Myanmar, Cuba, Bolivia, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. are clearly not examples of successful governance. They are negative examples of totalitarianism. There are scattered failed nations states such as Haiti and Somalia. There are nation states who are struggling to adapt to the cultural and governance precepts which make Age of Enlightenment principles so successful.

And the holdover establishments in much of the OECD are struggling with legitimacy among their own citizens. Scandinavia is increasingly moving to the right in the face of the crime and corruption attendant to the establishment fixation with open borders. Germany as well.

France has more of a class issue between regular citizens and the establishment, reflected in the year long yellow-jackets movement.

Britain has a profound and toxic mix of classism, Manderinism, and regionalism fueling the years-long Brexit debate.

Spain and Italy are likewise struggling with a crisis of government legitimacy and regionalism. Greece struggles with loss of legitimacy due to corruption.

America increasingly is grappling with the formerly absurd, now increasingly plausible, notion of an administrative coup by the establishment against the structures and norms which formerly served the Republic so well.

It goes on and on across the OECD. The earliest adopters of Age of Enlightenment principles, and the biggest beneficiaries, have had the prosperity which has allowed the ossification of an insulated and isolated governance establishment to ignore the needs and desires of the public.

I suspect the world is much safer than the bi-polar post-World War II structure between the West and the rest. But the path is long and winding and there are certainly many slips and back-slidings which have occurred and will continue to occur on the journey towards Age of Enlightenment benefits for everyone.

Our greatest challenge now is that the competence and ethics of the establishment parties are everywhere being challenged by the public at the very time when we need to be most competent and ethical to militate and mitigate the slips and slides of developing nations.

And Mexico is a great example. They went from a party dictatorship to a multi-party system. They are transitioning from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing and services economy. That isn't easy. Now they are suffering from endemic corruption, regionalism, and warlordism. The effectiveness of the State is clearly limited and the legitimacy being questioned.

America needs to be a light handed ally and strong within itself to weather Mexico's transitions. They will likely get there but not easily.

Instead the Mandarin class are self-absorbed, ignorant and incompetent. They are unresponsive to the public. They are fully absorbed with how to maintain their power, sinecures, and elicit social and monetary gains for themselves. The mainstream media, in frantic pursuit of clicks and backroom machinations plays its role of distracting from the truth and ignoring the fundamentals that can be seen emerging worldwide.

It is a sad state of affairs on the long journey to universal human rights, global prosperity, and representative democracy. Messy or not, the journey continues and we are unimaginably further along than any of the experts would have anticipated in 1989.