#32 Dr Stephen Davies - The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay

Politics over the last 10 years has felt for many people like a continuous experience of jarring dissonance. Not for Dr Steve Davies who is an accomplished historian and political theorist. 

His latest book “The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay” has the best explanation I’ve come across for why our map for understanding the public landscape is outdated. 

Politics has always been binary with voters aligning around a small number of salient issues. Alliances form around these issues but after a period, voters’ concerns change. Steve argues that realignments have been a regular feature across history and his book allows us to better understand and prepare for what is to come. 

 Reasons for the current re-alignment range from deranged monetary policy, economic stasis, a lack of genuine innovation as outlined by Peter Thiel in Zero to One, and aggressive rent-seeking. The consequences include a revival of nativism, isolationism and producerism (make stuff at home rather than import said stuff). In his words:

“what you have, and you could see this very clearly at the moment, is an economy in which the main way to become rich is not to generate profit and with that wages, but to capture rent.”

 Steve brought a range of historical justifications to the conversation from his book including the Roman Empire, China, Bismark, the French Revolution, Marx, and of course Henry George!

 We finish with what this means for the future in terms of voting patterns, shifting alliances and policy. It was a privilege to tap into Steve’s mind which provided accessible insights from decades of research, thinking, and experience.

 His book “The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay” is available online and in all good bookshops.

This podcast was produced by Matt Cooper with music composed by Loverman.

Transcript

Introduction

Speaker 0:00

Who has the greatest ability to organize and deliver deadly force at scale? Politics as a process is about, by definition, sordid compromise and the betrayal of principle. They became a class not just of itself but for itself. It's the demands of the current capitalist system that are driving the things that they don't like, like large-scale migration. Even if, as a hypothetical, you do succeed in reviving manufacturing as a major uh part of the economy of developed Western countries, I would say it's absolutely clear you will not get a return to manufacturing, a major source of employment.

Speaker 1 0:42

Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, Amul Pandya. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with rebellious, adventurous, and sometimes courteous free spirits. Right, Steve Davies, welcome to the Meeting People podcast. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me on. So there's a lot going round in the world at the moment in terms of trying to identify the causes of either what would one call a malaise or a shift of attitudes or a shift in life in general. And there's things such as polarisation, social media, populism, or the decline of centrism, that's kind of being banned around as causes, maybe symptoms. And I thought it would be great to have you on because you've written this fantastic book called The Great Realignment of Why the New Right Is Here to Stay, which I found in terms of its explanatory power a bit more compelling than, let's say, iPhones or smartphones. And in that you kind of you have a not a warning, but a kind of a suggestion that the alternative to politics as a way of resolving conflicts of interest is for those politics, is for those conflicts to be settled by open violence. This is why the complete failure of politics is a catastrophe that most would wish to avoid. Before we go into the the the alignment or the realignment that we're on that is underway or has already happened, can you just give us a bit of background on yourself? How did you get into politics? How did you or the history and the kind of school of political thought? What was the genesis that kind of called me?

Speaker 2:29

Well I I'm a historian by training and profession, you could say. And one of my big interests has always been the history of ideas, uh, history of political thought, things of that sort. I I once taught a course on uh the history of uh utopianism and millinarianism, for example. And I I've also always been regarded myself and identified myself as being in what you might call the radical liberal tradition. And so through that I became involved with what you might call full-time libertarianism, classical liberal activism. And eventually when I left academia, uh I moved into the world of think tankery and things of that sort. But for a very long time I was moving in certain circles and observing, shall we say, not quite from the very inside, but from the near inside, things that were going on. And what I began to notice towards the uh end of the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, was that the kind of coalition that had existed in uh the right, if you will, the so-called fusionist coalition, the Reagan Thatch years, was starting to come apart. And in 1999, I read a book written by a friend of mine, Virginia Postrel, uh called The Future and Its Enemies. And what Jenny commented on in this book was the way that uh the if you looked at the anti-globalization protest movement of around about 2000, the point where the WTO was being set up, there was a strange overlap between the objections made by the uh black bloc protesters, the radical uh left who were demonstrating in the streets of Seattle and elsewhere, and on the other hand, people like Pat Buchanan, uh, who was advancing this anti-globalist form of national conservatism in within the American Republican Party. And uh Ginny said, Well, there's something strange going on here because these two apparently completely opposed groups actually have a big overlap. And she said that this was because there was a new division in the world, which she described as being between stasists and dynamists. And the stasists are people who basically uh are fearful of or made very uneasy and uncomfortable by radical change and innovation. And the dynamists, on the other hand, are people who are welcoming to that. If you want to think of it in terms of the ocean model of personality, these are people who are either very low or very high in openness, and that's the basic divide. And this rang all sorts of bells with me, and it reminded me of what had been going on historically. And so I thought, well, okay, if I from what I can see going on in my own sort of social circles, I can see that a lot of alliances, political uh loyalties, coalitions, are breaking up and uh strange kinds of new friendships are being made. And on the other hand, new kinds of, you know, people people who were on the same side suddenly becoming foes. Uh only at the fringes so far, but I can see that this is actually going to go somewhere. And I thought, well, being a historian, my immediate thoughts think, well, uh, has this ever happened before? And that's when I started thinking about the concept of uh politic how politics works as a system, how politics is actually organized at a kind of meta-theoretical level in not just a representative democracy, but in almost any kind of reasonably complex social political order. Could be an oligarchy uh like, say, contemporary China or the Roman Republic, uh, could be a monarchy but with an aristocracy attached to it, like say the Ottoman Empire. And you've discovered there are certain patterns which are the same. Uh, and that led me then to think, well, okay, what does this tell us about what has happened in the past and what might be about to happen in the future? And that's when I came up with what at the time was a prophecy, which has now become an analysis.

Speaker 1 6:29

Yeah. And a reality, perhaps. Yes, indeed.

What Causes Political Consciousness - Ideas or Material Life

Speaker 1 6:32

Um just winding back to being interested in the history of ideas, you have this framework for kind of political clusters or policies or kind of agendas that kind of capture the zeitgeist. On the one hand, you've got this sort of almost like the great man theory of history, where you've got someone like uh an Adam Smith or dare I say a Henry George will say something very compelling, and then the academia and the think tanks, the media kind of spread that to the people. And then the other side of that is this sort of actually it's the lived experience of, you know, your politics will be, to give an extreme example, if you were, you know, in World War II Poland, you're gonna have a different politics than you would if you weren't. So you it's the kind of experiences that you have and how you copy people that draw it's actually that filters upwards to the elite who then kind of respond. Those two from are they both true at the same time?

Speaker 7:24

Or is that um I think no, I would tend much more towards the second. So I lean strongly towards a materialist theory of history. Uh not a Marxist one, more Annaliste. It's more Fernand Braudel and the Annal school than Marx. But the fundamental argument is exactly the one you've put, which is that it is everyday lived material experience that generates uh basically mindset or conscious, social consciousness. As Marx says, it is material experience that generates consciousness and not the other way around. Now, that said, that material consciousness in turn then leads you to act in ways that affect the material world. And so it's a complicated, like, mutual, mutual feedback system between the social consciousness, and I emphasize the social consciousness, because what you're talking about is not solidistic individual perception of the world, it may be in certain cases, but these are basically strange people. Um, it's forms of consciousness that you share with other people and which are formed in large part by the way you interact with other people socially through various human relationships of one kind or another.

Speaker 1 8:33

And the first point I just give an example is if you're if you grow up when your parents are working in car factories in Michigan in the in the 70s and eighties, you're probably not going to be too sympathetic to, well, the free market decides whether cars should be made in Japan or Precisely.

Speaker 8:50

You're not going to be that at all. And you're going to form a consciousness in which you see a certain kind of work as being highly male-coded, for example, and other kinds of work as being strongly female coded. Partly because that's your experience, that's what you see around you, but also because the social consciousness you form in that particular context, in, say, Flint, Michigan or whatever, is one in which manual work of a certain kind is very much associated with the man, partly because it's a biological necessity to be done by men, although less and less so by that point. And so, yes, that that leads to a whole series of attitudes. And then what you get are intellectuals who take that perhaps slightly inchoate social consciousness and theorize it out, produce abstract ideas. Now, what that means is that for me, abstract ideas are not the primary driver of social change. Um, but you can't understand social change without looking at the ideas. Because the way to understand ideas is that they are like maps. The um intellectuals, if you like, they are cartographers whose function is to generate uh abstract maps of the world which enable people to navigate it. Now, the extent that that's a the extent to which those maps actually do accurately represent the territory, in other words, the extent to which those ideas do actually engage with and reflect physical real reality will determine how useful they are. If you have a map of the world, a set of beliefs and ideas, uh elaborated ideas, which are simply not in sync with reality, then you're in really big trouble because you're going to do all kinds of things which will not have the results that you expect and may actually be deeply counterproductive relative to the ends you wish to pursue. So I I'm although I'm ultimately a materialist in my account of history, I do think that I I don't think of ideas as being a pure epiphenomenon. They are they are there's both a feedback between the ideal and the material because people uh behave in ways that are partly shaped and determined by the ideas. So there's a kind of multiple feedback loop between the two sides. But also because, as I say, without correct understanding of where you are, a correct set of maps, if you will, uh particularly without the ability to adjust the maps of the world that you have, you're not going to be able to make sense of the world around you in a way that enables you to act effectively. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 1 11:11

And do you see this time and time again, I guess. So you have that sort of that incoate social feeling that gets identified by a thinker. Let's say, you know, Adam Smith wasn't he was observing, he wasn't creating. But then all of a sudden, the downstream effect of that is I you know, ideas get taken by the followers of the interpreter to extreme. So there's that joke about Keynes, he went to a Keynesian conference in Washington and he comes back and says, I was the least Keynesian person in the room, or Darwin is, you know, all these people get they have these followers that take the map, and as you say, they can't they they live in the abstraction or the left hemisphere kind of um creation that the idea that the original thinker has done, and then they take it to this extreme that's not never.

Speaker 11:56

Or they elaborate in ways that the original nature hadn't expected. I mean, Marx is another example of that. He in towards the end of his life, in one of his letters, he actually says, Whatever else I am, I'm not a Marxist. When he had been uh discovering what people were now claiming and arguing in his name.

Speaker 1 12:13

So you have you know this yin and yang, uh, they feed on each other. Um that then sort of gets reflected in policy and what the political circles are doing, who are often the last to catch up, and then you have this alignment of issues, and then they but they tend to be late to the party, and that's what causes the realignment of the money.

Speaker 12:36

Well, no, not really. I mean, I think there's an intermediate stage in that process that you just described there.

Why Politics Means Compromise

Speaker 12:41

So the physical realities of life, the if you like, the material productive forces to use the Marxist expression again, the way people actually live, the way they produce the necessities of life and distribute them, the technology that they have available, the levels of innovation in the society, all these kinds of things, they tend to generate not only benefits, but also social tensions and conflicts. So there may be tensions and conflicts over, for example, the division of output between, you know, some people who want more of it for their kind of people or their location, some want more for the others. It may lead to conflicts over, you know, ways of living, for example, all kinds of disagreements of one kind or another. And so what you start to get is a division within society between different groups who have conflicting interests. And the question then becomes, well, how do you reconcile these interests? And to go back to the point you started off with right at the top, um one way, and a very common way historically of settling these kinds of divisions of interests is to resort to force, to see who has the greatest ability to organize and deliver deadly force at scale. Uh now that certainly settles the questions. You can't deny that. But it is not the way you want to go, because obviously the consequence and the cost is a lot of dead people, a lot of destruction, uh whole all kinds of bad things. So there is otherwise this art of politics, the practice of using a process of uh, if you like, rule-bound contestation of ideas and other things, uh, which determines which interest comes out on top. And what that process typically leads to, actually, is a form of compromise, the emergence of a modus vivendi, something which both sides will accept, even if it's not the full thing that they want. Uh, and you can see this happening in the political process over and over again. Now, what that means, by the way, is that politics as a process is about, by definition, uh, sordid compromise and the betrayal of principle. These are not bugs, they are features. If you go into politics, if you think of politics as being a means to realize a hundred percent of an agenda or a set of social ideals, you are barking up the wrong tree. That is the uh recipe for revolutionary politics, which is another form of resorting to force as a way of resolving social conflict. The whole nature of politics is that basically uh you uh avoid certain issues, and in some questions, you basically give 30% of what one group gets 30% of what it wants, another group gets 70% of what it wants, neither side gets the totality of what they want, but they're prepared to put up with what they get. That way, uh, sure, nobody is completely happy, but you avoid the terrible consequences of violent uh resolution of social conflict.

Speaker 1 15:38

Aaron Powell Can you give some examples then in history so let or maybe take us through the last hundred years ago or so in terms of you know you had the labor movement which was a reaction to a lack of political interest in people's welfare or the workers' welfare. And that you know, replaced the old liberal. And then what happened from that?

Speaker 15:57

Yeah, that's the classic example of it, in fact. In the later 19th century, with the advent of uh the modern industrial capitalism, basically, lar large business corporations, the application of electricity to production, these kind of things, you start to get a large, self-aware, organized working class uh with the so-called new unionism and things of that sort. And the the working class as a social interest, A they came to identify themselves as being somebody, a group of people who had a shared experience and who had therefore a shared or common interest. Um, they became a class not just of itself but for itself to use the terminology. And they began to campaign through various organizations to assert their collective interest uh as something that should be attended to uh in society. And they made certain demands for uh limitations on the working hours of the day, uh workers' compensation in employment, regulation of employment, higher you know, welfare payments, this kind of thing. Now, the established elite initially refused to accept this or even entertain these kind of movements. Uh they saw them as subversive and outside the bounds of the system. So in Germany, for example, Bismarck's initial response to the rise of the SPD, the Social Democrats, is to have an anti-socialist law which bans socialist parties from Parliament. It doesn't last. Because the movement is too bad. The movement is just too big. There are just too many people in the Ruhr and elsewhere who are going to support this. He also tries to do the same thing with organized Catholicism, because something else that's happening at the same time in Europe is the rise, often driven by workers' movements, of social Catholicism, particularly following Pope Leo XIII's uh famous encyclicals in the 1890s. Again, Bismarck has a go against that, but it doesn't work. And you get the rise of the Zentrum. And then what happens in the 1920s is that you start to get uh politics reorganizing itself around this division between the newly insurgent working classes and uh the both the old aristocratic ruling class, what's left of it, and what you might call the middle class, the professionals, the business owners, uh a whole bunch of other social groups roughly in that formation. Now, in some places, they try to hold the line and not concede anything at all. And the result of that is that then you get a turn to revolutionary politics and very extreme forms of politics. Conversely, there are some countries where the status quo reacts by resorting to extreme radical uh politics, which is what you get in Italy, for example. Right, so in Germany with fascism. Uh but when you allow politics to take its course, as uh happens in Britain, for example, or even in France, although it's typically a bit more fraught there, what you find is that, yes, eventually the Labour Party wins a decisive victory in 1945, and they push through a large part of their agenda. However, they discover that when they try to go just a little bit further with things like nationalising steel uh in the end of the Statley government, uh this provokes a backlash and they lose most of their majority. Uh and then they actually lose their majority completely, and the Conservatives come into power. Now, the Conservatives who come into power in 51, do they try to reverse all of the things that the Atlee government had done? No, they don't. They reverse quite a lot of it, more than people realize. They get rid of rationing, they get rid of identity cards, both of which the Labour Party had wanted to keep and even extend. Uh they denationalise steel significantly. Uh they also put and make it very clear there's going to be no further nationalizations, and they promote the property-owning democracy, as Anthony Eden calls it. But they don't reverse the whole lot. And then you get a further kind of movement in the uh sixties under Labor, but then again, this is partly reversed under Heath, and then significantly under Thatcher. Uh, and what you end up with by the end of the middle of the end of the 1980s is a kind of agreement that, well, we're going to stay roughly where we are now. Uh, and you end up with uh a large welfare state, but a predominantly priv private enterprise free market economy production side. That's the kind of modus vivendi that you finally arrive at with the new Labour governments. And that's how these things work out.

Speaker 1 20:09

So the free market uh in classical liberal times was seen as sort of spontaneous human activity that has its own um characteristics and it sort of needs to be kind of let l let let let to flourish or let to cook. Today the free market is more of a tool for extraction, definitively, a kind of tax-raising

What Ifs - Capitalism and Bloody Revolution

Speaker 1 20:30

mechanism for big government.

Speaker 20:32

Yeah.

Speaker 1 20:33

Um I'm just talking about some what-ifs with that framing or that context. So did the capitalist um or the commercial revolution that happened with the industrial revolution, did it let the, you know, did was it asleep at the wheel? You know, you have examples of the Lunar Society in the Midlands, for example, where they looked after their workers very well and you know they would they had good working hours, good paying, good pay, good conditions. But actually, if more people had replicated those radical dissenters that were looking after, well getting filthy rich, but also looking after their employees, we never would have had the the labour movement. It wouldn't have had to have happened because capitalists would have done their bit.

Speaker 21:16

I disagree with that, I'm afraid. It's true, yes, you have these paternalistic employers, people like Titus Salt or the Coleman family who run the Mustard factory in Norwich, this kind of thing. Um, many examples of that. But I think that the fundamental division, um, social division between employer and employee reflects the nature of the relationship, the employment relationship. If you are the owner of um a factory and you decide what is being produced, you're in a fundamentally different position socially and culturally to someone who, even they're being looked after well, is basically producing what they're told to produce. This is the fundamental division that Marx identifies. And what that means is that if you're a worker, your experience of the world is in many ways. Fundamentally different to that of someone who is in control to a greater or less degree of their own work, which includes not just the literal capitalists, but also the managers, the uh overseers, uh, the professionals, self-employed people, people of that kind. Your relationship to work and your lived working life is fundamentally different to that one that they have. And this leads to a different perception of the world and a different perception of how you want society to be organized. Uh, and I think that therefore that conflict was bound to arise as it eventually did towards the very end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. Uh, it becomes enormously what actually uh exacerbates that division, if you like, and makes it much more intense, is the transformation of capitalism that takes place after roughly the 1870s, because before then you have the kind of capitalism that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill are familiar with, which is one of essentially relatively small by modern standards, uh owner-operated companies where there isn't a division between ownership and control. The firm, even a quite large one, uh, is basically owned by someone who then is also the one who runs it, an active hands-on owner, if you will. Uh, but what you get, starting with the emergence of the American Railroad Company in the 1860s and 70s, and then increasingly in other sectors of industry as well, is the development of productive processes and plants which are way too large to be run in that way. And so you get the development of uh the modern multi-divisional business corporation, and alongside that the class of professional managers, and then you get the discovery of scientific management, you know. Uh Frederick Winslow, Frederick Winslow Taylor, time and motion study, and all that kind of thing. And that leads to large productive plants, very big firms, and the separation of ownership and control, so that now the owners of firms are widely dispersed, large numbers of shareholders rather than the singular person who runs it. Now, it's worth saying that this is a very generalized picture, and the way in which this change takes place is different in different countries. So here in the United Kingdom, uh, we are very slow in adopting this new model of business organization. We persist with family-owned firms for a very long time. We don't start to move towards what you might call the more modern form of business until the 1920s and 30s, with the formation of companies like ICI. Uh, one of our problems in the 20th century is precisely the persistence of family-owned businesses, which just simply can't compete because you've got to be really fortunate to have a family owner who is as good a manager as a professional manager who's trained to the job. And so, in fact, British car firms, for example, notoriously can't compete with companies like General Motors or Ford because they don't have the correct production structure. But generally speaking, that transformation of capitalism happens. And that's what really intensifies the social division between the large mass of uh workers, industrial workers and other kinds of workers in retail and other sectors, and on the other hand, the class of professionals, managers and so on, and above them the the asset owners.

Speaker 1 25:10

The other historical example, staying sticking with history for now, um prior to the Labour movement, the other what-if that I've been thinking about is what if the French monarchy had listened to the physiocrats or Tugar rather than ignored them. Yes. And for context, the physiocrats inspired Adam Smith and there was a a f a kind of justice-based budget that was proposed and ignored. Would would we have avoided Bloody Revolution?

Speaker 25:41

Now, in that case, almost certainly yes. Now that is a very clear um if you read the work of Francois Fourier, the greatest historian of the revolution in recent history, that's definitely what could have happened. The the fund if you think about the history of France, the French monarchy, uh, over its very long existence, the constantly recurring pattern is actually that of conflict between the monarchy and the aristocracy, and which the monarchy uh gains allies amongst the third estate, amongst the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, against the aristocracy. Now that's what was needed in the 1780s, uh and that's what the physiocrats and people like Togo are proposing, essentially, that the monarch should r reform the structure of the French state uh in in order to basically, amongst other things, make the aristocrats pay tax and take their fair share of the fiscal burden that needed to be born, given the cost of wars that France was always involved in. And also modernize administration in order to promote trade, commerce, and industry. And all of this would have could have would have could have been done had you had a king who was sufficiently intelligent and politically astute and strong-willed enough to do this. But unfortunately, Louis XV lived for a very long time and was congenitally not able to do this. But also, his heir, the Dauphin, suddenly dies. And he's succeeded instead by his useless grandson, who just doesn't have the willpower to do it. And almost certainly had he done so, we would not have had a revolution.

Politics Has Always Been Binary

Speaker 1 27:13

Yeah. And what fell out of that was the end of the Antarc regime and this left-right divide, which I've historically found quite a frustrating oversimplification of politics. But actually, reading your book, it is actually quite a useful framework because it does repeat itself. It depends- the what is considered left and right changes, but actually can you just outline what you know the origins of left and right and then why that still persists today?

Speaker 27:41

The thing is, my the fundamental argument is, and this is the kind of metaphysical argument I was alluding to, is that politics is always fundamentally binary.

Speaker 2 27:51

Yeah.

Speaker 27:51

Uh, because there's a fundamental division between people who are in power and people who are out of power. And that's one of those divisions like being pregnant or being unique, where there's no half-way thing. You either are it or you aren't. And so in Italy, in the Middle Ages, you have Guelphs and Ghibblins, in ancient Rome, you have the popularis and the optimates. And in the French Revolution, you have the people who sit in the king's right who support the ancient regime, only the ones who sit in his left who support the reforms theme. And basically, since then in the modern world, we've always had binary politics, which we've now used those terms left and right to describe and label. But the concepts of left and right, the actual meaning, what those terms apply to, has changed. So in the 19th century, it retains the same meaning it had in France in 1789. The right are the people who resist modernity, who want to preserve the institutions of the Alcyon regime. Monarchical and aristocratic governance, a confessional state, traditional forms of administration, things of that sort. Towards the end of the 19th century, people like Bismarck, they start to think, well, we need to kind of adopt modern industry, modernize this, but we still want to have a monarchy and an aristocratic government and all that. On the other side, you have the reformers who think we need complete freedom of religion, a secular state. We need to do away with the control of public speech at the church exercises. We need to do away with monarchy, or at least severely prune it back. We need a modern administrative state, this kind of thing. That's the division up until about the 1900s. And so in that context, liberals, classical liberals, are the left, as are the radicals. So the left at that point is a combination of classical liberals and radicals, including early proto-socialists.

Speaker 1 29:50

So just to contextualise that, you you'd have on the sort of centre left would be, yeah, we we need some reforms, we need we need to reduce the power of the state, but we don't want to go completely full um robespear. Yeah. And then the far left would be like, yeah, let's chop everyone's heads off. Year zero.

Speaker 30:12

And the the the fundamental issue really is um you want to create an economy of the form of government which minimizes rent. Rent being unearned income is paid simply for access to a natural resource. And so the moderate left thinks, well, we need a bit of reform to achieve this. The radical left saying things like nationalised land, could do away with rent entirely, tax rent out of existence, like Henry George proposes. And so you've that that's the kind of basic division there. And then in 19, in the 1900s to the 1920s, suddenly the nature of left and right changes. Because in the 19th century, the left generally are opposed to big government because they see government as being the source of privilege and therefore of rent.

Speaker 1 30:55

Yeah.

Speaker 30:56

Whereas by the end of the 19th century, they start the left starts big people who think that you need to use the collective power of society as expressed and exercised by government in order to achieve greater equality, greater uh social justice, if you will. Probably also for many of them a more efficient economy, they think, a planned economy. And on the other side, you now get people who say, oh, well, no, we are against this. We want to maintain the capitalist order against this insurgency against it. And so from the 1900s through to roughly about 10 years, 10, 15 years ago, the big left is people who favor a greater degree of collective ownership of the economy and operation of the economy, plus large-scale redistribution, whereas the right is people who are opposed to that and who favour free markets and the capitalist system. The old kind of traditionalist conservatives now vanished because that's no longer a meaningful political agenda. And now I think that alignment has broken down and gone, and we're now in a new world where left and right once again have acquired a new meaning.

Speaker 1 32:04

And one of the things that's changed in the last 150 years is academia and the performing arts were very much separate from society. They had their own radical views, but they were never part of the broader narrative. But because of mass media technology, they became front and centre. And you that credentialism, that that meritocracy that brought academia into the fold had it basically kicked off the social uh the kind of permissive society. Is that the right way of looking at it?

Speaker 32:36

Um I think what happened with the permissive society was that the ideas and values of what you might call the bohemian subculture of the theatre and music, which had always been there, but which had been a very marginalized small group, suddenly became much more widespread. And I think that's what happens in the 1950s and then really in the 60s. Yeah when those ideas get out of that very small subculture and become pervasive.

Speaker 1 32:59

And whining forward, so the the when your friend wrote that book, we had the key, yeah, as you say, the key battlegrounds were the economy, big you know, free market versus social democracy. And then the secondary aligning issue was foreign policy. So the free marketers generally aligned with hawkish interventionist neoconservatives. And they were in some sort of coalition against big government and um more dovish foreign policy actors. That has now changed. So should we talk through the causes of those changes and how they've manifested?

Post Cold War Technocracy And Its Backlash

Speaker 33:42

Yes, well, so uh uh what happened was at the end of um the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the issue of socialism versus capitalism is ultimately resolved. Because it becomes clear that the option of a radical alternative to capitalism is not realistically on the agenda. Uh, because communism has failed. Even more significant for the democratic left was the failure of the Mitterrand government in France in 1981 to 83, which seemed to show that the kind of radical Keynesian social democracy that they aspired to was also not possible in a world of free capital movement.

Speaker 1 34:20

And this is what Tony Benn wanted, right? That's right, yes. That kind of fortress economy.

Speaker 34:24

Precisely, yes, the so-called new new economic strategy that he and people like Stuart and Holland were proposing. And the conclusion that many on the left drew was, well, we can't do that anymore, because if we do, we'll just have mass capital flight. And if we do try to stop that, then we'll basically cut ourselves off from the world economy and we'll crash our economy. And we just we just can't do that. So they so at that point, I think, um the debate between capitalism and socialism, in a way, was over. Uh, as one wag, Mark Fisher put it, it becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And the result is we move into a kind of world in which you have a sort of the left becomes interested in markets as techniques to achieve egalitarian ends. And they their model becomes essentially the one you described, where you have a productive market economy, but you tax it heavily in order to fund redistributive social welfare payments and transfers of one kind or another. At the same time, though, the free market right also undergoes a kind of loss of faith and confidence. Not so apparent, but nonetheless real, speaking as someone who observed it nearly firsthand, because they come to realise they're never going to shrink the state beyond what it is now, because of the firm commitment of the great majority of the population to welfare transfers. So they come to realise that no matter what they do, the state is always going to be consuming about 40% of GDP. And so they they also abandon the idea of using politics as an instrument of radical change. Right. And they lose faith in politics. And like the left, they move to a model of technocratic politics, one in which basically politics is um essentially the use of all kinds of economic techniques to achieve what are thought to be universally agreed upon social goals: higher income, greater prosperity, uh, and the like. And so this gives the politics of the 1990s-2000s a kind of strangely desultory quality. And that's why the media comes to focus more and more on pure like gossip and uh personalities and politics as a reality TV show uh rather than anything else. Now the point is that uh two things happen with this. One is that there is a pushback against it, which is people like those radical black bloc protesters, but also Pat Buchanan. What Pat Buchanan is saying is that look, the economic argument's over now, we now need to focus on a different set of arguments, which in his case meant things like cultural conservatism, abortion, uh, opposition to gay rights, cultural traditionalism, but also immigration and foreign policy. So Pat Buchanan's platform was basically double down on the social conservatism, uh, get rid of NATO, and the United States become not an isolationist power, but just a regular unilateral great power. Uh, and thirdly, uh really stop immigration into the United States. Uh and so he tries to run for president of this agenda in the early, in the mid-1990s, and does moderately well actually. Uh, when you look at his agenda, you think, wow, this is what Trump ran on in his two elections. Uh this is MAGA. But he's seen off because the leadership of the party are sufficiently uh in charge that they can basically put him back in a box and keep that kind of politics under control. Similarly, on the Democratic left, uh the kind of Blairite, Gerhard Schroeder um group movement and the Bill Clinton movement in the States is able to marginalize the radical left and shunt them off to Puerto Alegre in Brazil and this kind of thing. And so all this why are they able to do that? Well, I think because basically at that time the technocratic post-Berlin war politics seems to be working out for most people. Most people are getting better off. And also, the conflicts that that process of globalization was giving rise to had not yet become really apparent. Excuse me. But then by the time you get to about just before the financial crisis, it's become pretty clear that a lot of people are seriously discontented with some of the consequences of the way that post-Cold War global economy is working. They feel that they're not sharing in the benefits, and they feel that it's having demographic and social effects that they find deeply disturbing and threatening. And this they feel that their concerns are not being uh responded to or expressed by the political class. Then in 2008, there's a financial crisis.

Speaker 1 39:08

Yeah.

Speaker 39:09

And that destroys the legitimacy of the existing system for many voters. And the the response to it, quantitative easing, makes that worse because what it does is lead to an asset price explosion, which enriches the wealthy massively, but causes enormous problems for people on average incomes because of the constantly escalating cost of housing. And what that then in turn does is to lead to the very rapid emergence of a kind of new anti-systemic policy that's initially on the right.

Speaker 1 39:42

Yeah. And you s you see effectively, I mean, was Pat Buchanan too early? Because as you say, the people hadn't started feeling the effects of let's take something like immigration, it was a serious issue for about three percent of the population in sort of 1995, and then that it kind of linearly grew to being probably today the the issue. Yeah, precisely.

Speaker 40:10

That's exactly what you can see. People have always there's always been a significant minority who have been agitated by large-scale immigration, going right back to the 60s. But the number of people who would put that number one in the list of things they are concerned about was never much more than about five to ten percent. But what you can see going on is not only the number of people who are prepared to put it on their list of issues they're concerned about is rising, but the proportion of the population who rate it number one is getting steadily larger and larger.

Speaker 1 40:38

And that's the reality on, you know, the materialist reality happening on the ground. Yes, precisely. And then you've got what these terms like the Uniparty or the Westminster bubble or the deep state or the blog, whatever you want to call it, that is looking at a completely different map or similar crum. It's in a different abstraction. It hasn't married up yet. And so the shock of things like 2016 is so dissonant. Yes, precisely that means they don't.

Speaker 41:04

And remember, um Polly Joinbee in The Guardian uh was always getting absolutely enraged by, as she saw it, ignorant voters who would moan about all politicians being the same. And she would say, How can you say this? They have very different ideas about economic policy, about welfare, about tax levels, this kind of thing. To which the point is, yes, but that's not what the voters who are saying that are pointing to. They're pointing to the fact that whatever disagreements they have about economic policy, even there I would argue only at the margins, they are in fundamental agreement about a whole range of other questions, like should we be in the WTO? Is globalization good? Should we have a free trade policy? Should we have relatively easy migration? And these voters have a completely different view on those issues to all of the people on the conventional left and conventional right. And so from their point of view, they're completely correct. Everybody is just the same.

Speaker 1 41:59

And then you get what you turn to political entrepreneurs who seek to scatter the market.

Speaker 42:05

Of which Nigel Farage is the classic example. So he comes along and he he's basically identifies that there is this increasing discontent about what lots of voters see as the erosion of national identity and of national sovereignty, which for complicated British historical reasons comes to focus on animosity towards the European Union. And he basically um takes that and turns it from being a fringe idea into being a main a much more influential one. And so you can see the steady rise of UKIP, which then provokes David Cameron into calling the referendum. He does that because he can see that if he doesn't, as he sees it, language the boil, UKIP is going to keep on gaining support. And that would mean that the Conservative Party would lose its historic position as the only significant party on the British right. And he's prepared to he and the Tory leadership are prepared to do almost anything to avoid that. Keep the money because uh the great advantage the Conservative Party's had throughout the 20th century and subsequently was until very recently that it was the only significant party on the right, whereas there was always one big party and one small party on the left, which weakened the lecture enormously in our electoral system. So he calls the referendum, and then everyone is shocked, just shocked when there's a leave vote. But it shouldn't have been shocking had they observed the kind of shift in attitudes that had been going on, because a lot of people uh were A, generally extremely upset about the whole way the economy and their life was going after 2008, but more to the point, they did have this deep feeling of unease about what they saw as the erosion of national identity. And that was why I think the arguments about economics and the remaining side made in the referendum were, while, in my view, accurate, completely beside the The majority of people who voted Lee, the overwhelming majority, were not motivated by economic arguments. They were motivated by completely different ones. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 1 44:09

The Remain side were playing an old playbook, which was Am I going to be I think I remember seeing David, even David Davis on the Leaf side interviews on BBC, and he said people were going to vote based on whether they think they'll be richer or poorer from this. Is that economic issues are now tertiary in the new alignment, subject to some mass depression or whatever that might come about. And interestingly,

Manufacturing - Producerism And The Myth Of Job Revival

Speaker 1 44:40

the successful insurgent parties that have come from this political entrepreneurialism have actually tacked to the left. So the AFD, the Rally Nationale, and with Marine Le Pen, and arguably reform as well, probably more left-wing than many of their members or MPs would like them to be on economic issues.

Speaker 45:02

Well, I think the reason is that the the it's always be it's always been the historical right, uh the right of the 20th century, the pro-capitalist right, that had a minority within it that was concerned with issues of things like national identity and immigration. So when so political entrepreneurs who speak to that concern are going to come from that part of the old political spectrum. What that means is that when they initially appear, they tend to come they tend to have a policy of what I would call capitalism in one country, to adapt a well-known slogan. And they they what they think is you can have a society with an economy which is to a significant extent deglobalized, which has strict immigration controls, maybe, you know, capital controls if they've thought this through, but which has radical free market policies within its own borders. But what you find is that almost invariably parties that start off in that space become more and more uh pro-welfare state and economically interventionist uh as they go on. Now, there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that's where the votes are. This is straightforward uh economic calectoral calculation. Astute politicians like Marine Le Pen can see that in France you're never going to win an election on a radical free market policy. France is about the most anti-radical free market country in Europe. So you have to tack to the left of economics, that's what she does. But I think there's also sincere conviction because these politicians look at the things they don't like and the things they want to do, and I think they realize that if all in order to achieve the goals that they want to achieve, they're going to have to intervene in the economy because it's the demands of the current capitalist system that are driving the things that they don't like, like large-scale migration. So that the the logic of their own position leads them to move to the left economically. And you can see this in one country after another. Now you mentioned reform. I think that reform voters, if you look at surveys of them, are clearly to the left economically, quite strongly so in many cases, on many issues. Uh and this is not surprising when you see where they are. Uh in places like Wigan, for example, uh, or you know, um other seats like Wakefield, where again they swept most of the council seats in the recent council elections. Uh the party members are still very much from all the older traditional right, if you will.

Speaker 2 47:37

Yeah.

Speaker 47:37

Uh and certainly the leadership, people like Nigel Farage, who I think is an unreconstructed factorized for certain kind and vintage, similarly Richard Tice. But the younger people in the membership are much more coming from this. Well, no, we do not want globalist capitalism. What we want is uh the not even just a national capitalism, a national development state, a state that will actually promote national industry, where the government will intervene to direct investment, uh, coupled with protectionism, maybe. You can see this clearly on the MAGA right in the United States, people like Senator Josh Hawley, for example, who on many issues is much closer to someone like Elizabeth Warren and the radical left for the Democrat Party than he is to the bulk of his Republican colleagues in the Senate. And he's an increasingly prominent uh figure in the Republican Party. He pee and behind him intellectuals like Oren Cass are advocating this kind of hands-on industrial policy, as is although his hands are tied at the moment, J. D. Vance, the vice president, that's also where he comes from.

Speaker 1 48:38

So to give let's try and give the steel man or give the devil his due in some respects. Um there's this what you described as a term, really interesting term, producerism, right? So you prior you domestically prioritise manufacturers and producers over the consumers of your in your country because you want to export and you know you don't mind that your population is basically importing more expensive things as a result because you put tariffs up and things like that. Let's got the rise of China that can produce, you know, draw up bridges, field hospitals, can reproduce ships at a rate, you know, if you take the poor Kennedy view of the world of like, can you survive the war even if you're losing the battles?

Speaker 2 49:20

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 49:22

If you're going to meet the challenge of having a a rising power like China, you do need some level of resilience, domestic manufacturing. You know, there's no point having a an amazing navy if you if you can't have a proper merchant shipbuilding industry that can replace that navy in a time of war if you were to lose battles. So is there some sense of actually you know globalization and manufacturing everything abroad has kind of gone too far?

Speaker 49:49

Uh I would strongly rebut that argument. I'm putting it out there as a sake of the OK. Let me say why I would rebut it. Prima Facie, that seems to make perfect sense. But only if you grant a particular foundational assumption, which is that the international world is a world of competition. A zero-sum world of competition, basically. So if you think of the world and the politics of international relations in terms of uh national competition, and okay, there are going to be wars sooner or later. How is the country which I identify with or aspire to lead going to be best positioned to survive such a war or to win it, hopefully? Then if you think that way, you are going to go down the route of neo-mecantilism, which is what you're describing. Uh having an inst a strategy of the state uh impot reducing the living standards of consumers by imposing protectionism in order to promote national productive power, basically. Now, the contrary view should be that, well, no, the nature of international relations should not be and need not be inherently and necessarily conflict-based. In other

The State Becomes Process Not Outcomes

Speaker 51:07

words, if you want to get into the sort of technical political science thing, uh you should not accept that there's a kind of Schmidtian view of the world in which basically the fundamental division of the world is between friends and enemies, and you've got to decide who your enemies are, who your friends are, and operate on that basis. You should think that it is possible to have a world in which, in fact, um it does make sense to not have your own shipbuilding industry, because, okay, if you got into a war with China, uh, you would lose because China has 326 times, and that is the actual stat, your shipbuilding capacity. Uh, but who why are you thinking you might be in a war with China? You know, this that that way of thinking is incredibly dangerous because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the classic historical example of that is the view that the German elite took before 1914, when um driven largely by German investment, Russia was modernizing at an incredibly rapid rate between 1905 and 1914. Uh, under Count Sergei Witter, the you know, the industry minister of Nicholas II, the Russian economy is the fastest growing economy on the planet, nearly 10% annual growth. And the German elite do not see this as a huge business opportunity, which it was, because it's German machinery, German machine tools, German steel that's being used, German capital along with French capital that is driving all this, they don't see it that way. They think, oh my god, this is an enormous threat. And what that means is that when a crisis arises in 1914, instead of thinking, oh, how can we like, you know, damp this down, uh, lunatics in the German high command uh think, oh, this is our chance to knock off the Russians before it's too late. And they then persuade the secular leadership, Bethmann Holberg and others, that yeah, they have to back the Austrians uh and the Austrian ultimatum and basically have a war with Russia, which they know means a war with France. Uh, but uh they think, oh, we have a cunning plan uh, you know, to knock the French out uh quickly. The Alfred Volkswagen. You know, but it turns out it's a cunning plan of the Baldrick variety, which you know doesn't work. And also they assumed that the British Empire would not join the war, uh, which turned out to be a complete miscalculation, of course. So the point is that going back to your original point, um the this kind of argument that you need uh to promote domestic industry for national security reasons or reasons of uh increasing national power, which is defined as being national productive capacity, particularly in manufacturing, but also in things like food and so on, that assumes as its starting point a competitive world where conflict is inevitable. And okay, you may find you what you may say is, well, that is partly the world we're in, but it's not the world we should be in. Uh and we're in the bizarre situation at the moment where Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party's leadership is talking perfect common sense and saying, look, this is not the way we want to go. We want to go down a world of free trade and cooperation. Now you can argue that the Chinese are, you know, not playing by the rules, if you will. Personally, I think that's overstated, but you can make that case reasonably. But the point is um the arguments that they're making are, I think, the correct arguments. You do not want to assume conflict and then act on the basis that you have to prepare for a conflict to happen, because that's the way of making sure that there will be one.

Speaker 1 54:41

Yeah. Um in terms of actually, while we're on World War I, let's do another what if, if possible. 1909 there's a budget, liberal budget that comes out with Lloyd George. I believe Churchill was the one who wrote the budget.

Speaker 2 55:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1 55:02

Uh instituting my favorite my favourite policy of all time, a land value tax, which then uh gets subsequently reversed after World War I and actually the government has to pay back the tax that it's raised to landowners. Had we not had World War One, um would that have been a turning point in his in British history where actually we wouldn't have had such rising socialism because of the the re the redistributive power?

Speaker 55:33

Well that's an interesting that's a very interesting question. I suspect, yes. I mean I I would say had we not had World War I, it would have been a completely different history for Britain for all kinds of reasons. Uh all sorts of reasons. One of the big reasons would have been that, in my view, the Liberal Party would have remained one of the two major parties in the British um state. Uh I think the empirical evidence from places like Lancashire and elsewhere is that by 19 uh 14, the Liberals had pretty much seen off Labour as a serious competitor. Uh they'd been they'd given them a free run in about 60 seats in 1906, because they hadn't been sure they would beat the Tories. In the event they, of course, they won the biggest landslide ever. But after that, there's increasingly intense competition. But generally speaking, apart from a number of very specific seats in London, they're seeing off the late the Labour Party. What undoes the Liberals is their split during World War I, the division between Lloyd George and Asquith in 1916, and the catastrophic split in the Liberal Party that that leads to, which is not resolved until Asquith has his massive stroke in the mid-1920s, 1925. Um and had almost certain had there not been World War I, the Liberals would not have split. Uh they would have remained a united party. Uh they would have been able to pursue the kind of radical politics that Lloyd George and Asquith had formulated. And I think that, yes, you would have had a move towards a much more redistributive state founded around things like land tax and things of that sort. Uh and labour politics would not have developed uh in the way which it subsequently did. And in particular, trades union politics would probably not have developed in the way which it subsequently did. Uh the Triple Alliance, as it was called, um, of miners, transport workers, and railwaymen would uh not have, I would I think have broken up actually in the 1920s, almost certainly. And the the trades unions would have not gone on to set up their own party as they did in 1921. You would almost certainly have had a socialist party, but it would have been a bit like the NDP in Canada. It would have been a significant third party, but not one of the two major parties in the state. So I think yes, that would have been a major turning point. We would have ended up with a completely different kind of policies. You would still have had, in my view, a division in politics over the interests of capital and the interests of labour because of things like the employment relationship division, which I mentioned. Yeah, and the social because of the scalability of these funds. Yeah, and so I think that that would still have been there. You would still have had arguments about uh you know the degree to which the state, for example, should own things like the railways and the mines and things of that sort. And I think there probably would have been nationalization of certain sectors. I think the railways and the coal mines would have been taken into state ownership, um, you know, probably sooner than they actually were in the the actual history we did have. I think it probably would have happened in the 1920, late 20s or 30s, with the Liberal government doing it rather than uh th the uh the Labour Party as it actually was. Uh but on the other hand, you probably would not have had the development of the welfare state in the way that we did. But this is all kind of pure speculation.

Speaker 1 58:45

And going back to producerism, is there a is there a realm where the West or the US and Europe does develop manufacturing or re-re-rediscovers manufacturing and industrialization through free market means? And what I mean by that is, you know, supply-side reforms, uh let flex more flexible labour markets, lower minimum wages, easier permitting, and all that kind of thing. Actually, that's what's been holding back domestic industry, not so much, or is the comparative advantage in the fact that China can and Asia can just make things so much better at scale, much more cheaply. It wouldn't have mattered had we had a less regulated environment.

Speaker 59:29

I think if you had a less regulated environment, then you might be able to revive certain kinds of manufacturing, yes. I mean, there's no reason to think that it's simply destiny that the um manufacturing hub of the world has to be located in the Far East. Although history would tend to suggest that, I would, I would say, by the way, because historically that is where most of the world's manufactured goods were made before about 1800. But there's no reason why, you know, things like production at scale, very long production runs, low unit costs couldn't be achieved in uh an economy like an integrated European economy or the American economy, if you will, because you've got almost as large a population as you have in China, so you could have very large production runs. Uh I think though that actually what what needs the point that really needs to be made here is that yes, even if, as a hypothetical, you do succeed in reviving manufacturing as a major uh part of the economy of developed Western countries in terms of the value it contributes to GDP, it's very unlikely. In fact, I would say it's absolutely clear you will not get a return to manufacturing being a major source of employment. Yes. And so a lot of the people who want to revive manufacturing, what they really want to revive is manufacturing jobs. They want to go back to a world of Ford Dagenham employing, you know, tens of thousands of people on a giant production plant in East London, that kind of thing. Or, you know, ICI on T's side doing the same kind of thing. And that's not going to happen. You might have a huge car plant, but it's not going to employ that number of people anymore. Because of automation. Because of course of automation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:01:03

So winding back to today. We have a We have a this realignment underway, and I think that the political establishment or the media, whatever you want to call them, is are they catching up to it and waking up to it, or is it still are they still dragging their heels in the old paradigm?

Speaker 1:01:21

I think they're still dragging their heels. Um some people are starting to catch up to it. So Adrian Waldridge, for example, um of The Economist who's just published a book called Centrists of the World Unite. Very good book, by the way, I recommend it. Uh Adrian is a commentator who has caught up to it. I think people increasingly are. The problem really is with the kind of full-time lobby correspondents, professional political correspondents, who are very heavily invested in the game as it's currently being played, if you will, here in SW1. Yeah. Uh to use Dominic Cummings' term for it, not just literally West SW1, but the the Westminster bubble, so to speak. And so there is this persistent tendency to think, well, it's really all about economics. If we can only solve the economic problems out, crack the housing market, make the NHS a bit more functional, people will stop being so angry and pissed off, and they'll they'll go back to voting for the two traditional big parties and the Greens and reform will, you know, wither away as they should, as fringe parties. And I think, you know, that's fundamentally mistaken. And if you think about the world that way, you're going to constantly be unpleasantly surprised. Because what you will find is that things that you see as temporary aberrations are uh just persisting. And that's why my book has that subtitle. Uh, you know, why the new right is here to stay. I mean, I could have put brackets unfortunately after that, because that's my view. I think it's unfortunate it's going to stay, but it is, you've got to accept that.

Speaker 1 1:02:52

And Cummings talks about the blob or the deep state, or whatever you want to talk term you want to use. This is this a function of what normally happens with institutions is that they start off with noble ideals and you have, I think is it Purnell's iron law of bureaucracy, where the an institution over time is made up of two different people. One who pursue the goal of the institution. So let's say education, it's teachers wanting to teach and and further the education of children. And then there's a second constituency of people within the institution whose sole aim is to enlarge the institution. It's the net it doesn't matter what it is, it's like get a bigger budget, create more admin. It's the sort of internal sort of logic.

Speaker 1:03:44

That is part of it, undoubtedly.

Speaker 1 1:03:46

Is this just a function of what happens to institutions over time as they rot and decay and you have to reflect them, or is this part of the great realignment issue that we've got with the technocracy that has been Trevor Burrus, J I think yes to both, really.

Speaker 1:03:59

I mean uh that that Jerry Pornell formulated that law a long time ago, uh in a science fiction novel, actually. Um but yes, it's uh that is an undoubted reality. You can see it's over and over again in history. Uh the late Bill Niskan, American economist at the Cato Institute, also famously formulated, and it's beautifully spelt out by uh Sir Humphrey to Bernard in one of the episodes of Yes Minister, where he tries to explain to Bernard how civil servant knows he's doing a really good job. He's got a bigger budget and a bigger department, you know. Um so this is inevitable. However, what I think you've got and had since roughly the early 1990s is an additional element which is a focus and a manic focus on procedure and process rather than output. Uh so there isn't even a focus now so much on growing the budget. The focus, and you can see this in its quintessential highest degree in Keir Starmer, is on have we done the correct process? Have we jumped through all the hoops? Uh that man is incapable of saying the government is going to do anything uh without adding the kind of rider uh following consultation and things of that sort. And so what you have is a system where the goal of the activity is simply to tick boxes and to uh make sure that the process is followed correctly, uh which means it's absolutely impossible to actually do anything. And this is not a left-right point. This this means that government is now paralyzed, regardless of the ideology of the party that's currently in office or the ministers who are currently nominally exercising authority. Not only do you have to struggle with what Don Cummings is talking about, what you allude to there, the self serving nature of bureaucratic institutions, uh, and produce a capture, as the economists call it, where institutions are run in the interests of their staff rather than their purported goal or function. They've also Got to deal with the fact that no matter what they do, they'll be told, oh, it can't be done, or it can only be done after you've done all these things, which we see constantly in government procurement processes and in plan the planning process, which is why we've not yet built HS2 at a cost so far of what is it, 50 billion or whatever the latest account was, uh, you know, in the same period that the Chinese have built 15,000 miles of you know high-speed, high-speed railway. Uh so that is a new element, it seems to me. And I think that is playing a crucial role in the realignment because what is enraging more and more voters on this new right, and increasingly, I think, on the kind of radical left that is represented by people like Zach Polansky and the Greens, uh, is the perception that um if the the public will vote for and want and demand very forcefully policy X, and then nothing will happen. Policy X will not happen because uh people, the courts, uh, the judicial process will simply block it because the processes are not being followed, all kinds of rules are being broken. And the obvious kind of quintessential way this is illustrated is through the apparent complete inability of the British state to deport dangerous convicted criminals or to deal with dangerous mentally disturbed people who are being allowed to roam around loose in the community, despite constant warnings from various people uh that uh this person is is a danger both for themselves and to others. And we saw this with the tragic case in Nottingham, where the man who went and killed several people and tried to kill several others, uh there'd been constant warnings made by one agency to another agency that he was an extremely dangerous, he was a paranoid schizophrenia, basically, he needed to be hospitalized, forcibly hospitalized, uh, and taken out of the public realm for his own good and also to protect the wider public. But what the recent review of this process showed was there'd been what the uh author called an endemic culture of buck passing, in which everyone was thinking, well, okay, have I ticked the boxes, have I done what the process says I need to do? Yes, I've done it, not my responsibility, over to you, Joe. Uh and this kind of thing is enraging the public. And so it's that sense of com there's no common sense politics. So what that means is there is a feeling, this feeds into the paranoid conspiracy feeling that there's a secretive elite out there who don't want people like myself uh to have our views expressed or uh reflected in actual policy by government, whether local or national. And that more than anything else is what is driving the so-called populist right. And I think, you know, you're starting to see it already on the populist left. And I predict with a hundred percent confidence that if, let's say, Zach Balansky were to become Prime Minister or a Minister in a coalition government, uh, and the you know, suddenly the bond markets and the courts also strike down lots of policies that they want to do, like building lots of council houses, because that's what would happen. Would not happen, because the state would be hog tied by all these uh processes just as much as private developers are, uh, then suddenly you would find an equally high rate response on the left. And I think that more than anything else is what is discrediting the status quo and driving the uh two the more extreme versions of the two new sides that we have.

Speaker 1 1:09:30

Because things just can't get done.

Speaker 1:09:32

Things just can't get done, yeah.

Speaker 1 1:09:33

There's a cultural demonstration of that. And there's do you ever come across this is going to hurt? Which was a book that became and there's an example in the in the TV series where there's some light bulb in the corridor that just doesn't it's it keeps flickering and it's really annoying for people who keep walking up and down the corridor. The doctor, there's some process of getting a light bulb replaced in the L in the NHS, which is like the start of an economics joke, but it just takes weeks and weeks until the doctor decides I'm just going to change the light bulb myself. And it's actually really annoying the the the storyline because rather than that be the end of the story and hurrah, because he didn't follow that procedure, the the storyline punishes him because the process wasn't followed, some manifestation has like and the story writer, rather than picking up on the issue, was like, oh no, procedure trumps outcome. Yeah. Um

Innovation, Stagnation, Financialisation

Speaker 1 1:10:25

can I therefore I think this is related. I want to see if it is related. Talk about Peter Thiel very quickly. So his criticism of globalization is that in a world absence of innovation or vision, let's say, your your incentive is to then produce whatever innovations have happened in the past more cheaply elsewhere. So you have this horizontal economic growth rather than vertical growth of zero-to-one kind of innovation. And that lends itself to America invents something or Britain invents something, let's make it in China. And that's that's that kind of horizontal, incremental innovation or economic growth lends itself to diversification and procedures. So the your asset management industry, your fire, what is it, the fire academic finance, insurance, real estate. If you want to make money and you don't have any vision or ideas about the world, you go, you become a lawyer, an accountant, or an asset manager, or a firm you diversify away your risks and you follow procedures. Whereas actually, what you if you're a country or a society or the West that believes in itself, you you not only innovate but then you build on that innovation. So this is the sort of the Xerox Parks thing where Xerox has discovered the graphical display unit and it took an early Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Rosniak to come in and look around and go, you're not doing anything with this, why don't we scale it up? Do we need a bit more vision and self-belief to to A, innovate and then act upon that innovation rather than constantly if you constantly try and diversify and outsource, then you will just be a procedural following mechanism rather than a doing outcome-based.

Speaker 1:12:18

I I think that he's on to there is a real phenomenon that he identifies there, and he's not alone in this. Uh there are many, many people, um, some economists, quite a few historians, who have argued that the um heroic age of innovation is in the late 19th, early 20th century, and that since roughly the 1960s, innovation has really declined. And the innovations that we do get are ones that make life more convenient, but which are not productivity enhancing. And what you also don't get is what you're talking about there, which is radical innovation that is systemic and transformative in one way or another. Uh, and you could say, well, what about AI? But even that arguably is just the latest stage in the computer revolution that began in the 60s. So that that's what he's talking about. Now, you could say, well, why do why do you why do people go into finance? Why does process come to dominate this? Uh, is it because of globalization? Uh, I disagree with that because Tingle's argument essentially is that you need to have a kind of project. You there needs to be a strong national identity in order to create what are essentially non-economic incentives for people to innovate and then scale the innovation up and develop it. And in many ways, he's on the same page as Mariana Mazakato with her idea of the enterprise state uh and the the moonshot economy, as she could talk about. Getting to Mars. Getting to Mars, that kind of thing. And so Elon Musk is another person who shares this. So there's a strange overlap between parts of the left and parts of the parts of the right on this kind of issue. Um but I think actually there's a I will give a different explanation for what I think is undoubtedly a real phenomenon. And I think it's deranged monetary policy. Because why is it the thing is this why does somebody go into finance and into financial manipulation and financial engineering, uh, private equity rather than doing the kind of, you know, uh stereotypical Henry Ford thing, uh you mentioned Steve Jobs or, you know, the Xerox Parks thing, uh, developing a new technology and then elaborating it, working it out, scaling it up, and all that kind of thing. Well, I think the reason is quite simply that the returns are much, much higher in finance. You make way more money uh in private equity or manipulating uh financial instruments than you do in that kind of classic hands-on uh you know manufacturing. Now, why is that? Well, it's because since the early 1990s, certainly the mid-1990s, we've had an increasingly deranged global monetary policy. Uh money has been way too cheap, and enormous amounts of money have been produced. The growth of the money supply using broad money uh measures, uh, which defines most money as being credit issued by the commercial banking system, has been vastly in excess of the productive growth of the actual physical productive activity. Now, this hasn't led in a straightforward way to inflation, but what it has meant is that the returns to it's one of these things that is bid up the value of assets enormously. So we have had sustained very rapid asset inflation, particularly after 2008 when this was ramped up. But also what it's led to is an enormous increase in returns to pure financial manipulation, because you had the money to do it. And all kinds of business enterprises have taken off, which are of the kind that you described and that Peter Teel is moaning about, uh, which are actually not economically viable without this access to really cheap, uh artificially cheap, that is money. Uh shale oil production in the United States is an example of this. Is this due to technological innovation? Partly, but not primarily. It's primarily become a major industry and a major revenue stream because you can fund the drilling of shale wells with uh money that you borrow at vanishingly low interest rates. Now, whether that will continue is a very big question, because if interest rates return to historical norm, I'm not sure that shale or the economics of shale oil actually add up. But that's I think that's what is made mainly behind this. And so I think China actually, in a way, is rather alarmingly an example of why why might you say has China been more innovative? Because it has been. Most of the indices at the moment indicate that the Chinese economy and Chinese society in general is significantly more innovative than American society. If people find this very hard to accept, but I think the empirical evidence is true. And one of the reasons is that uh finance in the um Chinese system is strictly constrained uh and held because it's controlled by the party. Now, the party has wasted a ton of money, enormous overbuilding of cities and roads. I mean, people like wax lyrical about the incredible infrastructure the Chinese have built, but a lot of that is like superfluous. It's excess capacity. It's excess capacity. But uh at the same time, you do have a lot more innovation and a lot more scope for innovation in the industrial sector and other sectors, like you know, um retail and so on, and distribution. And the reason is, I think, because y if you're an ambitious young person in that country, the big rewards are not to be found purely or even primarily in the financial services sector, because that service is kept in a leash. And the party, in fact, has basically pulled the plug or allowed large amounts of real estate uh developers and companies in that sector to collapse, and the financial sector has just taken the hit. Now they can do that because most of these banks are state-owned. Yeah. So basically the state is going to swallow the cost ultimately. But what they've also done is to uh instead of bailing out the financial sector, they've basically let it take a massive hit, which is why Chinese growth at the moment is still high by Western standards, but down on where it was before.

Speaker 1 1:18:07

For the population size, it's it's effectively a recession.

Speaker 1:18:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:18:11

Um just a final thing I wanted to discuss before we get on to the conclusions of the book, which which are which what we've just been discussing is a nice segue to you mentioned shale oil, for example, uh a natural resource.

Rent Seeking And The Global Housing Market

Speaker 1 1:18:25

You talk about the financialization of the economy and deranged monetary policy. Would could one argue that that that's even that's not getting to the root of it? So the root the root cause I've been exploring is of all recessions is effectively, you know, to go to the classic example, you need three things for an economy to work. You need people to use, you know, lay people to use their hands, uh, exert effort, you need tools and equipment, and you need access to natural natural resources or the land. And when you have privatized access, when land is privately, you know, you can speculate on land, that that effectively creates a cyclicality. You know, the root of recessions is property speculation, effectively.

Speaker 1:19:14

I agree with that, yes. Um the the the Rent Yeah. Sorry, go on, go on. What I'd add to that is that another way of framing this, um which m moves it out beyond purely land, is that what you have, and you could see this very clearly at the moment, is an economy in which the main way to become rich is not to generate profit and with that wages, but to capture rent. In other words, the share of total product which is going to rent, the third category of income in Ricardo's famous division, is increasing at the expense of both profit and uh wages. And rent means it's in Ricardo's classic model, it's what you're talking about. It's the payment you make to the person who has a private ownership monopoly of a natural resource, such as coal under the ground or land itself, or for that matter, the buildings built on the land and things of that sort. But it also includes uh people who can artificially restrict access to, say, technology through intellectual property. That's another form of rent, uh which which nobody would who's ever looked at the history of patents would deny. The whole point about a patent is that it creates an artificial monopoly on the production side to generate a monopoly rent to the patent holder. And this is done supposedly to create an incentive. So if you look at the contemporary economy, what you see is not only massive asset price inflation and asset speculation, notably in real estate, obviously the quintessential thing that you're talking about, but also in financial assets of all kinds, notably debt, uh what are basically fancy forms of tradable debt and bets upon those debts, uh derivatives and seconds. Leverage upon leverage. Yes, precisely. Uh uh plus also uh enormous amounts of money paid out to the holders of intellectual property uh in one way or another. What you could see is an economy which is dominated by rent seeking. Now it's competitive rent-seeking because people are fighting like ferrets in the proverbial sack to be the person who corners the rents. But what that does is remove the incentive to pursue profit, which is what's supposed which is what drives innovation in a capitalist economy. And so increasingly you have uh an economy dominated by what is ultimately and fundamentally a parasitic relationship. So I think yes, that is exactly what is going on here.

Speaker 1 1:21:41

And Teal, interestingly, is a Georgist. Um but what it feels like is there's if you look at history, people in favour of tackling rent-seeking, you know, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, uh Winston Churchill, compared to today, if you look at people who are in favour of a of some sort of removal of the benefits of land speculation, you've got the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, Andy Burnham, the Tony Blair Institute.

Speaker 2 1:22:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:22:11

Is it a Conservative Party or kind of reform is this a blind spot for the right because so much of their voter base is effectively population, you've 98% of their net worth has been built up over time in owning a property in the Southeast.

Speaker 1:22:25

This is well, I think that depends on which country you look at. I think in many European countries and in the United States that is less true. Here in the UK, I think there is a very real degree to which the new right, the in the shape of the Reform Party and even more so restore UK is a boomer phenomenon. It it's a kind of boomer politics. Uh and therefore you're talking about essentially older, retired or near-retired homeowners. Now they are um people who were paying rent, if you like. They were they were paying mortgage mortgages, but they now mostly have paid off the mortgage. So they're a property owner. To the extent that they own more than one property, which has been a favoured investment vehicle in that generation, they are also part of the rent-drawing class and the perspective class that you talk about. And so, yes, I think there is an extent to which um the new right in some countries do have a blind spot about this. Um, not so in uh other areas necessarily. Now, this this does suggest all kinds of interesting things about the way politics might develop in the future. I mentioned in the in the that in the 19th century the left included uh both the kind of moderate left, Whigs, if you will, uh over to the kind of complete radical left, neo-jackamins and things of that sort. And the kind of what you might call the the centre of gravity of the left at the time was basically made up of people who saw their overall goal as being to reduce the degree of privilege in society, uh including above all economic privilege that generated rent. Uh and so the hence uh demands for things like land reform uh and changes to the tenure laws, things of that sort. And on the more radical levels, things like land value tax or even outright land nationalization and its replacement by a leasehold system. Uh that was the left, yeah, precisely Singapore. That was the left. The right were the Tory Party, for example, or you know, the historical rights in most countries were the defenders, amongst other things, of the traditional landed class. That was their their social basis, if you will. Now, um what uh what you might see going forward, uh and this would be an interesting case study, would be if the left comes to be, if you like, reverts back to that kind of 19th century radicalism. So it becomes a party of a kind of egalitarian, radically free market, but also anti-rent economy. But that hasn't fully developed yet because they're still very much, as you could see with Andy Burnham, whom you mentioned, still much tied up with the idea that you need state ownership of large productive enterprises. So they're still got this legacy from the historical socialist tradition. Conversely, I think a lot of free market liberals um are still tied up with Cold War liberalism and see themselves as being anti-socialist first and foremost, who therefore are deeply sceptical about some of these more radical ideas for uh getting rid of renting rental income. So there are plenty of libertarians who, for example, think we should not have intellectual property. I'm one, have been for many, many years, over forty years now, but that's a minority position, although a significant minority, I must say. Uh, and so that's the division. On the other hand, the right might develop into something which is nationalistic and also in favour of a kind of what Joel Kotkin calls neo-feudalism, uh, a kind of thing which favours large established uh rent extracting institutions, which are then seen as being the kind of national champions of this future. That would be very worrying. Very alarming. And that would have a natural fit, I'm afraid, with the kind of neo-mecantilist economic strategy and view of the world that I described earlier. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 1 1:26:07

Well, this is where what I'm working on in my conversations with classical liberals or free market libertarians is, you know, yes, liberalising the planning system is great, and it should, you know, a sensibly functioning economy should have sensible planning rules that don't strangle. But that's that's a bit of a red herring when it comes to, I think, in terms of the housing crisis or the access to property for the younger. It's it you could you could liberalize the planning system, you know, and that that doesn't mean developers are going to flood the market with supply. It just doesn't work like that. And actually, the best way to solve housing, which is a rising issue that you've identified in your book that wasn't an issue for obvious reasons 30, 40 years ago, you know, the benefits of those sort of things ultimately cutting stamp duty, you know lower taxes, um sensible planning, or ultimately when land is privately speculatable, end up in higher property prices. Yeah. As per Ricardo. Um I would like to elevate, you know, yes, planning's important, but actually I find that free market radicals are too scared of introducing new taxes. Yeah. Or new because they're so worried about the state getting bigger and bigger that they they even if it's the right thing to do, they don't they don't.

Speaker 1:27:22

Yes, that's that is the argument. The the way to um if you like convince people that this might be a good thing, we would say, well, look, if we did this, uh we would introduce land value tax, we would also radically reform the planning system, uh, we would definancialise housing, which it probably involves other kinds of steps you would need to take. Uh but in but in return this means you can, for example, get rid of housing benefit completely. Uh scrap cut welfare with that uh far far more painlessly, not completely painlessly, obviously, but much less painfully because one of the main reasons why so many people need and depend upon state handouts and Transfers is because the high cost of housing. It's absolutely crippling. If you're in the middle of the income range, then if you look at the amount of income you've got after you've set aside energy and housing costs, that income has been stagnant for a very long time or even been going down. So that's the that's it that in turn is what then drives the growth, the explosive growth of all kinds of supplementary income transfers to make up for. It's not the only factor, of course, low productivities are the huge one, but but yes, it's a big factor. So that I think is how you can.

Speaker 1 1:28:31

You could argue they're related because if you have access to land, you could probably be more than that.

Speaker 1:28:35

Well, I mean the whole market is given. I used to think that it was simply a matter of reforming the planning system, but I I ceased to believe this a few years ago. Um and one of my reasons for thinking this is if you put into a Google search uh or a chat GPT search, blank, any global metro name, housing affordability for locals, you will find that, no matter what metro you talk about, the answer you get is that the housing there is unaffordable for people on the local average income. And this is because housing is now a globally uh speculated market. So it's to do partly with uh the financialization of the world economy. And so what that means is if you are, let's say, somebody who's wanting you're a local wanting to buy a house in Metro Manila or Shanghai or Nairobi or London or any major metropolitan area on the planet, you're not just competing with your fellow Shanghainese or uh Manilans, you're competing with global money. Uh and you so you see what's happened, for example, in somewhere like Bratislava or uh Lvov in western Ukraine, where the housing is incredibly cheap for somebody from, say, Britain or Germany. So what do a lot of spec you know, enterprising people do? Now you can vote them only. They go and buy a house in Bratislava for what they see as a song, but at a price which is way beyond what the local Bratislava market can sustain. Uh and so therefore, the kind of globalization of the housing market and its complete financialization, the degree to which housing has become a speculative investment good rather than a pure consumption good, um, is what has uh played a major part in driving political unrest on both the left and the right in the last 20 years. And unless it is resolved, I don't see that ending anytime soon. The big problem, and it's a huge problem where it intersects with another social problem, which is what makes this a wicked problem, as the term has it, is that the bulk of the housing is owned by the elderly. And one of the problems we have in many countries, developed countries, of course, is that we have an aging population. And we have an aging population which is inevitably, because of biological reality, going to impose greater and greater costs on the health system uh and also on the pension system. So you get a double whammy. So you get a double whammy. And the problem is that therefore these this the elderly population is now sitting on this enormous uh capital asset uh because of the capitalized value of uh rental value of the of this property. Uh and the the political bullet that will have to be bitten uh sooner or later in one country after another is uh basically taxing that uh housing wealth in order to release funds to defray the health care costs of the elder and the others. But politically that's going to be really difficult.

Speaker 1 1:31:40

Yeah, but it's them paying for their own health. You know, if you're owning a four-bedroom house in the southeast that you've lived in for 40 years and you're well, you know, you most of your wealth is tied up into this house, you probably have to unlock that a bit to pay for your own health.

Speaker 1:31:51

Well, what you I mean there are ways you can do that. I mean, the the thing is, there is the obvious phenomenon of um asset rich but cash poor. Um this this is a well known well-known syndrome. But what you can do, for example, is uh have the payment take the form of a charge, which will be met out of the proceeds of the house when you die. But that's all the kind of technical details. The point is it's a very difficult you could see why the politicians uh of both left and right are averse to touching uh this particular issue, because anything that upsets old people is, as Theresa May and indeed Andy Burnham can tell you, uh the kiss of death politically at the moment.

Speaker 1 1:32:26

Well that last segment was confirmation bias being injected directly into my veins, so thank you

The Long Bet

Speaker 1 1:32:31

for that. Just to just to wrap up, um as you know, I like to ask all guests the same question, which is what I call the long bet 10-year time horizon, to make a prediction. I thought you can predict whatever you want, uh, but maybe the conclusions of the book are kind of quite a useful um answer to that. But whatever you whatever you want to choose, really, how do you see the next 10 years based on your explanatory framework that you've set out?

Speaker 1:32:57

Okay, I've got I I think that in the near future, what we're going to see in one country after another is the emergence of actually a three-way division in politics. Uh you can see this very clearly in France, for example. You will have the new nationalist right, you will have a radical left, and you will have an emergent group which is usually misleadingly, in my view, called the centre. So in France that's uh Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardia, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and um Macron, um, and whoever succeeds him is probably Edouard Philippe as the leader of that faction. And I think we're going to see that three-way division in one country after another. Now, as I said, politics is always ultimately binary. So by the time we get to the end of the decade, the ten years, I think that will not be what we'll have. One of those three current polls will have become the kind of minor bit part supporting act to the other two. The question is which two will it be? Now, one I think is in pretty much every country is bound to be the nationalist new right, because there is a sufficiently large block of voters for whom the issues that this nationalist new right are is are raising, national identity, migration and the like, are central that there will that will be one of the two poles.

Speaker 1 1:34:17

So that's your primary salient issue.

Speaker 1:34:20

They are the ones who are so that's about 35% of the population in most countries, more in some countries, and that will therefore be one poll. The question is, will the other poll be the radical left or the so-called centre? And that I think is up for grabs, quite honestly. I suspect that in most countries it will be the so-called centre, but it will not be the centre in the form it currently has. The problem the centre has right now is that it is essentially a defense of the status quo, of the technocratic neoliberal politics of the 1990s and 2000s. And that is a busted flush because uh nobody really is clearly not working, and working less and less to the extent that it ever has done for more and more people. Um but at the same time, I think that um what people in that so-called center group have is a commitment not only to cosmopolitanism, one side of the new divide that I think we're now moving into, but also to broadly fundamental liberal principles and values, the rule of law, uh, the idea of limited government, uh, the idea that majorities cannot simply do what they want or have their will put into effect, because uh, you know, John Stuart Mill's famous formulation, you know, the whole of humanity has no right to impose its will on one man any more than he would have to impose his will on the whole of mankind. So the I think what will probably happen at the end of the ten years is that we will revert back in many ways to a nineteenth century kind of politics, in which you will have a new kind of right on the one hand, this new nationalist right, and on the other side you will have a uh new left, if you will, which will be basically predominantly a kind of reunited liberalism, in which left and right liberalism come together to form a new, more radical sort of liberal politics, uh, in which they take on ideas from the radical left, who will be the kind of supporting act in this model. Uh it could be that it that doesn't work out, and actually it's the radical left that becomes the uh major other player, but personally I would bet against that. Okay. One other prediction there. Yeah, go on. Uh, which follows on from that, and this is a prediction I've made, which I'm even more sure now is going to be true, although most people think I'm completely wrong about this, so I'll put it out there. I think that in the very near future, the next, certainly in the next ten years, the left in Britain is going to become uh anti-EU and very hostile to the idea of rejoining the EU. Whereas the radical right will actually become increasingly pro-rejoining the EU on civilizational grounds. And that's because I think the EU is going to be increasingly dominated by, or will have to make a historic compromise with, the nationalist right in the various countries in the EU. And I think that if you're looking at an EU where France has got Jordan Bardetia as its president and the AFD is in power in a coalition government which it dominates in Germany, uh then if you're on the radical left, particularly when you realise that the EU will also stop you doing the kind of things you want to do with monetary policy and so on, you're going to suddenly turn against the EU. And so I think we're going to see an abrupt flipped in attitudes towards Europe of the kind that we last saw in the 1980s. Yeah. Uh where quite suddenly the left then flipped from being anti-EEC to being very pro, and the Tory party and the Tory right made the opposite like pivot. I think we're going to see that happen in reverse. We're going to go to a situation where being very Europhile is now right-coded and being Eurosceptic is left-coded.

Speaker 1 1:38:01

Well, that's definitely a contrarian take, depending, you know, looking at the news flow right now. So that's that's great to hear. Let's see how that pans out. Steve, it's been an absolute blast. I think there's so much for people to process and digest, so we should probably end it there. But just to recommend everyone once more time one more time, the great realignment, why the new writers here to stay, in parentheses, unfortunately, perhaps, um, depending on uh how punchy you want to be. Um, it's been really thought-provoking and really helped me understand what's going on in the world beyond it's all about smartphones and social media and whatever explanations people have been grappling with right now. So thanks so much for coming on. My pleasure. And uh, hope you enjoyed it, and uh, we will see you again soon. Thank you. This has been Meeting People. I've been your host, Armor Pandier. This is a podcast produced by Matt Cooper with music composed by Loverman.