Politics

The year is now 2020. 14 years ago, I started this site as I was planning a move from Melbourne to Sydney. Previously, I’d been publishing on a friend’s server, buried in a subfolder, but that’s when the site came into its own. So now, with this post, I’ll have published items in 3 different decades - ain’t that a thing about getting old. Right from the start, this site has been about my own political observations - one of the very first things written here was about the Cronulla Race Riot in December 2005, a decidedly unwelcome event for someone just about to move to the city. ...

This thinkpiece is opinion with some small basis in researched reality, but please don’t take this as definitive. All my own views. The argument being made in the US post-Trump and in the UK post-Brexit is that the forces of globalisation and free trade have led to increasing inequality, and that’s what the working class of these countries is getting upset about - their increasing distance from the “elite” that are perceived to benefit from the globalisation at the cost of the working class. Except what’s happening here - to put it in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat terms - is that the playing field is flattening, at least at the lower end of the income distribution. This means more than just bringing the developing countries up to the standard of the developed countries - it’s also causing the developed countries to drop down a little, or more rather a reversion to the mean. The way the working class in developed nations are feeling the pain is an inevitable consequence of this globalisation - the advantages they had were only ever relative, because for all that there’s said about equality, it was never the case that developed economies were “equal” - it was entirely in their average lying well above the global average. But now… it’s not so much. The working class in developed economies is being levelled with the working class in other economies. The working class of developing economies are coming closer to equal footing as borders come down in the pursuit of the dollar. Immigration makes this even more so, where those willing to work for a low wage by developed economy standards are comparatively better off by their personal standards because it’s a high wage by their own standards; this only starts to break down when the wages in their home countries lift enough that the differential isn’t worth it. Inequality has always been there; inequality, globally, has gotten lower. However, where it was also unequally spread - where some countries had less internal inequality - it’s now being more equally distributed around the world as a global population is included and free trade and movement of labour makes the production of goods anywhere the same. ...

Today marks the end of the Obama presidency, and in some ways, it seems to mark the end of an era - or perhaps more pessimistically, the respite from the decline of an era that effectively ended with the events of September 11th, 2001. Perhaps we’d been to unwilling to admit it over the last 8 years, but since 2001, the United States of America turned from being a leader for the multicultural, involve-everyone-everywhere sentiment to the navel-gazing self-interested country that its enemies had always accused it of being; where George W. Bush led the country into misadventures and tipping the delicate balance that had held for the 90s in the Middle East into the dumpster-fire, basket-case of a region it seems right now. ...

And so at long last, we reach US Election Day 2016, when a reckoning has finally come for the American political system - the candidates perfectly set up as the establishment facing the insurgents, the know-nothing Donald Trump squaring off against the know-it-all Hillary Clinton. How did we get like this? How did we get from the point where once upon a time, a candidate that was even threatened with being revealed to be cheating on his wife, would step back, stand down, or resign altogether than face the music, to the point where we’re seeing a candidate standing despite those accusations and worse being thrown around, and still he appears to be as close as a 3% gap? ...

A bit more US-centric, but this gives me the shivers: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, paralyzing political divisions threatened democratic governments. Disputes over free trade, and the free movement of people and goods, were a big reason. Stymied by polarization and endless debates, the Senate proved unable to resolve those disputes. As a result, nationalist sentiments intensified, leading to movements for separation from centralized institutions. People craved a strong leader who would introduce order — and simultaneously combat growing terrorist threats. ...