July 2024 – Into the Woods

Envying the U.K.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It felt a little like Christmas morning to wake up today to the news that Britain’s Labour Party has swept the Conservative Party out of power, reducing the number of Tory seats in Parliament to its lowest number ever. At last, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcized. Though there have been two Labour governments in the U.K. since Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Thatcher’s neoliberalism has been the governing philosophy since 1979.

Here in the U.S., President Biden has done much to lay neoliberalism to rest, though our foolish political media, interested only in political conflict rather than government, have had very little to say about it. Biden’s accomplishments are particularly notable in light of a Congress nearly paralyzed by a right wing desperate to take the U.S. back to the days of the Confederacy.

Though most of the political work of reversing neoliberalism and Thatcherism remains to be done, the intellectual work is solid. I am reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, and will write about it later. Stiglitz drives a stake into the zombie heart of neoliberal dogma. It’s a book that I hope policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are reading. Now is a good time to become familiar with the thinking (and proposals) of progressive economists, the better to judge what Britain’s Labour Party does now that they have pretty much unchallengeable power, with 412 seats in Parliament compared with the Conservative Party’s ever-so-humiliating 112.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party lost 38 seats and retains only nine seats in the British Parliament. And in France, it’s looking like the French are going to have to learn about right-wing governments the hard way, like the United Kingdom did. And here in the U.S., we are now in a state of complete chaos and unpredictability until the Democratic Party decides what to do about President Biden. At least in Britain people can sleep easier now.

C.J. Sansom’s Shardrake novels

Novels don’t have to be masterpieces to be worthwhile, especially if, like me, you read for escape and thus prefer novels that are set in another time and another place rather than the here and now. C.J. Sansom (who died in April), was very popular, as he deserves to be.

Sansom’s Shardrake character is a solicitor in London during the time of Henry VIII. Shardrake is a hunchback, accustomed to being stared at and made fun of, though he is a gentleman. Sansom’s plots are mysteries, and they tend to be a little wooly and complicated, as they need to be if a novel goes on for more than 600 pages. But what I like best about the Shardrake novels (I have read five of them and will read the other two) is Sansom’s evocation of Tudor England. We travel all over London on foot, on horseback, and in boats on the Thames. Sovereign takes us to Yorkshire, by horse on the way up from London and by ship on the way back. Heartstone takes us to Portsmouth in July of 1545, a date you’ll be familiar with if you know what happened to Henry’s beloved ship the Mary Rose.

Sansom reminds me a bit of Winston Graham, though Sansom is not nearly as good a writer as Graham. Like Graham’s Poldark character, Shardrake is a man ahead of his time who loves justice rather than power. That is a danger. Sansom makes it quite clear how dangerous the Tudor period was, not only for those close to the court who lost their heads, but also for the ordinary people who got crossways with a divided church that was just as cruel and dangerous as Henry. Historians give estimates that vary widely, but it seems that 57,000 to 72,000 people were executed while Henry VIII was king. Sansom’s Henry VIII is a repulsive character. Other characters such as Thomas Cromwell are more complex.

At the risk of making everything political, Sansom reminds us (as does Winston Graham) how hard it can be to be ahead of the times one lives in. We are joined to such people in the past by a kind of invisible thread. We identify with them. There can be no real compensation for those who lived through the many horrors of history. Historical novels serve an important purpose by helping us to never forget.

Good government gets little attention

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, was in the backwater city of Winston-Salem yesterday for the groundbreaking on a small project backed by the Department of Transportation — a $4.8 million pathway for bicycles and pedestrians that will link downtown with the city’s medical center. That’s small potatoes as transportation projects go. But Buttigieg is a hard-working guy.

In the turmoil that has arisen over President Biden’s debate performance last week, Buttigieg is one of the people mentioned as Biden’s replacement. Buttigieg is a wonk, a highly effective secretary of transportation, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and a Rhodes scholar. I was happy to stand out in the July sun to see him in action.

Earlier in the day, both Buttigieg and Governor Cooper were in Raleigh for the start of a bigger project. That’s a railway project that will connect Raleigh to Richmond and then onward to Washington and beyond.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, while in Raleigh Buttigieg dinged Trump without naming him: “Every one of those projects — and the 57,000 others that are funded, and counting, through President Biden’s infrastructure package — is really about one simple purpose, which is to make everyday life easier for the American people. … I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is in contrast to what we’ve seen before, a prior administration that declared ‘Infrastructure Week’ every year without any results until it became a punch line, a byword for all talk and no action.”

Events like this force the local media to turn out whether they want to or not. The backwater media would much rather be writing about chicken sandwiches, petty real estate deals, and third-tier chefs in crummy and overpriced local eateries that won’t last a year.

Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina