"How Not to be a Politician," Rory Stewart - A Review

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

How Not to be a Politician, Rory Stewart

August 17, 2024

 

“If forced to spell out a political philosophy, I would have said that I

believed in limited government and individual rights; prudence at home

and strength abroad; respect for tradition, and love of my country.”

                                                                                                Rory Stewart (1973-)

                                                                                                How Not to be a Politician, 2023

 

Idealism gripped the traditionalist Rory Stewart when he left his post as the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to campaign for a seat in Parliament. An intelligent, ethical man of boundless energy, he was elected in spring 2010 for the constituency of Penrith, on the border of Scotland. At the same time David Cameron was elected Prime Minister to lead a coalition government, ending thirteen years of Labour government and beginning fourteen years of Conservative government.

 

Prior to his Harvard assignment, the Hong Kong-born and Oxford-educated Stewart had served as a British diplomat in Indonesia and Montenegro; he undertook a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal; and he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. As well, Mr. Stewart had written two best-selling books.

 

While he enjoyed time spent with his rural constituents, his story chronicles his gradual disillusionment with his party as it drifted apart from Thatcherism, and his disgust for the cronyism of politics in general: “We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators, but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation; we might become members of independent committees, but we were expected to be loyal to the party; and votes would rarely entail a free exercise of judgement.” Nine years later, in 2019, he attended a dinner in London. He, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and his nemesis Boris Johnson were running for Prime Minister. Someone asked him why he thought he was a Tory. He explained: “I said I believed in love of country, respect for tradition, prudence at home, restraint abroad.” “The table,” he wrote, “laughed.” He lost. Johnson won. Three years later, with Liz Truss as Prime Minister, Stewart ruminated: “Government might be about critical thinking, but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not.”

 

One might ask why he had decided to pursue a career in politics. The first decade of the 21^stCentury was a turning point in geopolitics. The glow from the West’s victory over Communism had begun to fade. As Stewart writes: “…2005…was the year in which the number of democracies ceased to increase, and in which the civil war in Iraq exposed the full catastrophe of the Iraq intervention. It was the last year in which the British economy was larger than the Chinese. Facebook had just been founded and Twitter was about to be launched.” The rise of China, the ubiquity of social media, and the credit crisis of 2008 “created,” he writes, “the space for an entirely different politics: the age of populism…” In 2009, the idealistic Rory Stewart felt he might be able to blunt that change. He found he could not.

 

While he writes of British politics, his disenchantment with all politics is pertinent, especially to the United States where unity has disappeared and political discontent has set in, as extremism created politics of populism on the right and statism on the left. The book’s strength is that it illustrates challenges we face; its weakness is that it does not provide a solution. Nevertheless, it deserves your attention.

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

 Two lessons come with Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia: One, Republicans should stick to issues, such as education, which are more important to voters than personalities, and two, endorsements by Donald Trump are fine, as long as he does not campaign in the candidate’s district.

 

New Jersey, as I write, is still too close to call.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf”

November 3, 2021

 

“Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you

start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible.”

                                                                                                       Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

                                                                                                       American author & filmmaker

                                                                                                       Michelin Lecture, Caltech, January 17, 2003

 

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage. 

 

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

 

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

 

Nobody really knows the costs of climate change, but it is not cheap. “Analysts,” according to an article in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “say as much as $150 trillion is likely needed over the next three decades to fund renewable energy projects, upgrade electric grids, mothball fossil fuel plants, seed new agricultural technologies, and pay for damages tied to climate change.” The questions have always been: What are the economic and social costs of doing nothing versus the economic and social costs of holding the rise in temperature below two degrees Celsius? And, is that possible? Regardless, funds will be needed. The job of convincing the world’s banks of the urgency of adjusting their loan portfolios to accommodate what politicians are calling for has fallen to Mark Carney, former head of central banks in Canada and the UK, and now the United Nation’s point man on climate-change finance.

 

It was the Industrial Revolution, which raised living standards for all fortunate to live in countries affected, that caused man-made emissions of CO2. And it has been that wealth over the years that has enabled the problem to be addressed. Assuring future economic growth is the best antidote to the problems of climate change (and of poverty). Policies that hinder growth, such as raising the cost of energy, whether in developing or developed nations, will harm living standards. We should all take responsibility for how we live our lives, which means being environmentally sensitive. But leaders must avoid fomenting a class war. We must recognize that the poor, whether individuals or nations, need affordable sources of energy to improve lives. Feel-good corporate welfare, in contrast, funds favored businesses in exchange for political support and boondoggles that are more spectacle than substance. 

 

A meeting of the G-20 in Rome last weekend preceded the United Nations’ 26^th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow. Leaders of five countries (China, Russia, Mexico, Japan and Saudi Arabia) failed to show up. Those five countries represent just over 40% of all CO2 emissions, according to worldometer. The meeting in Glasgow brought together between 20,000 and 25,000 politicians, officials and businesspeople from about 140 nations, fifty fewer than met in Paris in 2015. Nevertheless, London’s Daily Record estimated on Sunday that “more than 400 private jets will blast 13,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere…which will produce more global warming gas than 1600 Scots burn through in a year.” 

 

In Rome, President Biden brought with him seven cabinet officers, including Secretaries of State, Treasury, Interior and Transportation. He traveled in an 85-car motorcade for a one-on-one meeting with the Pope. All vehicles had been shipped to Italy, with some shipped on to Scotland before heading back to the U.S. Perhaps such grandeur was felt necessary, but it seemed excessive and insensitive when the subject was man-caused climate change. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would have united in condemning such a monarchial display by the President.

 

With the exception of a trade agreement with the EU on steel and aluminum, most news reports said the Rome meetings failed to live up to expectations. In an interview with the Associated Press, Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa said of the G20 meeting in Rome: “The world’s biggest economies comprehensively failed to put climate change on the top of the agenda ahead of COP26 in Glasgow.”

 

On the Glasgow conference’s opening day, Jeremiah’s continued with dire predictions. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who hosted the meeting, likened the challenge to a James Bond “doomsday,” saying time was running out to save the world from global warming: “this is not a movie – and the doomsday device is real.” He warned that, in the worst-case predictions, cities like Miami, Alexandria and Shanghai could be lost “beneath the waves.” Johnson was followed by Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN. He said we are “digging our own grave.” The Prince of Wales, told the world leaders that “time has quite literally run out.” At some point, doomsayers will be right. The Earth had a beginning. It will have an end. Scientists have estimated that that time is probably a billion or two billion years in the future, based on a six or seven-billion-year life.  A changing climate is a prospect for which we must be prepared. But rather than giving a false sense of hope that we can forestall the inevitable, we should focus on adaption. What happens if we hit net zero in terms of CO2 emissions and climate continues to warm…or cool? Those who issue calls of doom would be wise to re-read the story of the boy who cried wolf.

"A Middle Way - Is It Possible?"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“A Middle Way – Is It Possible?”

December 18, 2019

“Medio tutissimus ibis”

(You will go most safely by the middle way)

                                                                                                Ovid (43BC-c.17AD)

                                                                                                Metamorphoses

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“I’m Partial to Impartiality,” December 12, 2019) Joseph Epstein wrote, “I happen to be someone who, in politics, yearns for impartiality.” I suspect that that desire for impartiality is common to most Americans – in the current environment, it “is a consummation devoutly to be wished,” as Hamlet would say. Most recognize we live in a pluralistic society, comprised of people from every nation on earth, representing all religions and races. In our homes, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, we speak 350 languages. Nevertheless, we have in common a love of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We favor a middle road, which accommodates all travelers. But, in recent times, with our biases, real and imagined, we struggle for a common purpose and a common morality. Where I disagree with Mr. Epstein, whose mind and writing style I admire and envy, is that he puts principal blame on Donald Trump for the discord that has disrupted our lives. I would certainly agree that Mr. Trump has accentuated the divide, but real blame is more widely distributed.

Politicians have compartmentalized the electorate – youth versus age, urban versus rural, rich versus poor, people of color versus Caucasians, immigrants versus nativists, gays versus straight, globalists versus nationalists. As well, there are those in the industrialized (and former industrialized) parts of the Country who have seen coastal elites become wealthy, while their incomes have fallen or grown stagnant. There are a few immigrants who have chosen not to adapt to the culture of their adopted country, and there are people who have been here for generations who fear a breakdown in the social unity they have enjoyed. A culture of victimization, identity politics and moral relativism accentuates these divides. There are secularized elites on the coasts who cannot understand why folk in rural areas cling to religion and guns. There are those who have hated Mr. Trump from when he first ran for the Presidency, people who will do anything to remove him from office. (Last week, Nancy Pelosi, in a slip-of-the-tongue, said she had been working on impeachment for two-and-a-half years. Yet, hypocritically, she claims it is with great sadness she has advanced articles of impeachment.) And, of course, social media allows factions to gather in greater numbers, with more intense focus. And there are those like me who fear that the decades-long tilt in Washington toward statism, with the acquiescence of mainstream media, risks the fundamentals of personal liberty and economic liberty on which this nation was founded. In good conscience, I cannot remain silent.

So, how do those of us who fear the loss of individual liberty compromise with opponents’ intent on subjecting the people to greater regulation and governance by the State? How do we stay midstream? If we do not, will we rip the nation apart? We recognize that the natural path of government is toward more regulation, greater power and, of course, higher taxes to support its bigger size. And what should the role of government be? We wonder, are we correct to worry? Illumination is found in a 1787 letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison: “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

The process of governing is never as smooth as it seems in retrospect. Violence erupted on the floor of the House in pre-Civil War days. Reconstruction wasn’t much easier. Roosevelt’s New Deal created anguish, among conservatives, as did the Civil Rights riots in the 1960s and among progressives during the Reagan years. Differences are a hallmark of a democratic system. Most people prefer a centrist approach to the extremism of today. But that requires political objectivity, a characteristic foreign to most of us, including many of those in government.

Recent events have given confirmation that fears of an imperious government are justified. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in a report written by Clayton Thomas of the Congressional Research Service, claimed that American military and national security leaders have been lying about progress in Afghanistan for eighteen years and across three Administrations. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report showed that FBI agents methodically lied about the Russian collusion, asserting, as Newt Gingrich recently wrote, “…that everything Congressman Devin Nunes had reported about the FBI’s activity was true, and everything Adam Schiff had said was a lie.” While Mr. Horowitz’s report suffers from double-speak and government gobbledygook and could use Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for clarity, he ends his section on the four FISA applications: “We concluded that the failures described above and in this report represent serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications.”  And we have yet to hear from John Durham, the special prosecutor appointed to look into the origins of the Russian investigation. Richard Jewell’s lawyer’s summation, in the eponymous movie directed by Clint Eastwood, tells the jurors a truth, that his client’s accusers were “two of the most powerful forces in the world, the United States government and the media.” It is the willful use of government power for personal or Party purposes that we should fear. On the flip side, the UK elections last Thursday saw a democratic expression of the will of people. In Boris Johnson’s election, socialist and anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn lost, and the electorate voted for Brexit – the nation state of Britain was deemed to be a greater protector of individual sovereignty than the multinational European Union.  

The challenge for republican democracy is accommodation – how do we access the middle way – without abandoning principles. The United States is a hundred times larger, in terms of population, than it was in 1776 and far more diverse; yet the principles embedded in our founding documents are ageless. Democracy is hard work and includes an acceptance of accountability. We are a nation where the people – not elected leaders, bureaucrats or military leaders – are sovereign. Sovereignty is a privilege that presumes responsibility and requires an educated electorate. It feeds on free markets. It demands impartiality on the part of government servants. It calls for unbiased reporting by the media. Yet, both government leaders and the media have failed. We have seen their bias and how they have been used – both bureaucrats and reporters – to try to unseat a duly elected President. We need government to provide communal services like schools and roads; we need a government of laws that is a guarantor of property and human rights; one that is an arbiter of disputes and that protects the cultural cohesion of society. We need a government that is accountable to a sovereign people, people who must be responsible and accountable citizens. E Pluribus Unum tells us a middle way is possible. But we cannot abandon liberty.

It is easy to slip, Eloi-like, into the comfort of permitting the state to assume responsibility for more and more aspects of our lives. That is the promise of socialism, which is sold most easily to those forgoing the dignity that comes with hard work, who lack aspiration and personal responsibility, to those without knowledge of our civic structures and economic history. The dream of socialism may sound enticing, but the reality is servitude. A middle way, even when deemed safe, only works when we understand the stakes.