Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 29 July 2023
Hunter. European Impasse. Violence in Manipur. Social Trends. American Oligarchy. Mindful History. Wallace Stevens
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of world history in the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Hunter Biden and America Prospects in 2024.
Governing the Multipolar World. Impasse and challenge in Europe.
Using History Mindfully. Violence and social conflict in Manipur, India
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Four social trends that remade society.
What surprised me most. American Oligarchy and Geriatric Care.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Moric and Mindful History.
Reading and Closing Verse. Wallace Stevens and the Blackbird.
Have you checked out my books?
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
So, on with the newsletter….
1. The Big Story
The Hunter Biden plea deal fell apart. The government proposed to accept a guilty plea on minor charges in exchange for no investigation of serious charges, including acting allegedly as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine and China. The judge said, “No, You cannot do that.” Now this might seem a small process step in a courtroom far, far away. But the judge’s independent act of decision may prove to be the flapped wings of a butterfly that cause a political cataclysm in the USA.
It had looked like the President’s son was going to get off scot free; notwithstanding that he had been caught in flagrante delicto, on his own laptop by his own handheld iPhone, in many immoral and allegedly illegal acts. The press has finally begun to report the documents, testimony and evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden and the alleged, and prima facie well-documented, links to the President. One outlet even used that infamous cliche of the Trump years that the “walls were closing in” on Joe Biden. Of course, in 2020 the infamous laptop was suppressed, and the story was put out that all this funny business in Ukraine was Russian disinformation. Documents and investigations have since proven this smokescreen to be disinformation spread by operatives of American security agencies and the Democratic party.
Jonathan Turley, the distinguished legal scholar, has written an important piece on the evidence of wrong-doing, and how traces of evidence that point to the President have been revealed in Congressional hearings. Turley wrote:
While the media can continue to suppress the evidence and allegations within their own echo-chambered platforms, truth like water has a way of finding a way out. The scandal is moving forward with or without the media.
The issue may explode. More than one finger has been taken out of the dyke that protects the Biden clan from the flood of justice. The waters will rise and surge around the weakened swimmer, Joe Biden, as he prepares for the 2024 re-election campaign. Those waters around Biden are turbulent. There is an insurgent candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, who, although he is yet another representative of American oligarchy’s political clans, makes noises that he wants to dismantle parts of the American war machine. On the Republican side, Trump looms, and some polls suggest many voters may switch from Biden, who had only won 2020 by 40,000 votes. Since then voters have learned the laptop story was true, and the RussiaGate story was a hoax. They have learned that Kabul was not safely in Joe’s hands, and that Ukraine is not winning the war for democracy. They also see Joe Biden work methodically to persecute his political opponent for records management disagreements, while appearing to protect his son and family on serious charges of corruption and worse. As these surging waters rise, will frail old Joe, that old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, be able to summon the political machines to secure his re-election?
I have forsworn predicting elections, although I once believed I had strong political intuitions. But elections, in the end, are just one of the rites of our political order. Whatever the outcome of the 2024 USA elections, the next 16 months in America look like they will be a time of troubles. Could political disintegration of the gerontocratic American republic occur over the next two years? Or will it just become a slowly crumbling shambles, like American cities? Scandal, impasse, gridlock, and factional squabbling do not make the best conditions to fight a war against Russia, against China, and against the independence of the multipolar world. American exceptionalism has regressed to Old Corruption. Which country in the world wants to be ruled by a family like the Bidens?
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
American political events could, of course, just end in a muddled impasse. After all, political processes often do not fulfil the human longing for dramatic resolution of events.
An impasse also seems to be developing in Europe. Spain has delivered a deadlock election. Germany’s governing parties have become the minor parties, and have less support than the Christian Democrats and the Alternative für Deutschland. NATO cannot agree on its candidate for Secretary General. Macron limps on among protests and a more confident LePen in France, but nothing has really changed. Britain is a mess, and heads to elections in 2024 along with Old Joe, and already people complain that Keir Starmer will just entrench the same old, same old. Europe faces the challenge of rebuilding its economy, federated union, military, social cohesion and political consensus in adverse circumstances. The task of its leaders is made harder by the declining Empire across the Atlantic using the old continent to get what victories it may. It is not a garden in Europe. It is an unruly multipolar world.
But I doubt it will collapse. My next paid subscriber essay on social fragmentation and elite competition comes out on Monday. It briefly considers Peter Turchin, End Times and his other work on elites and counter-elites in conditions of elite overproduction. Turchin has assembled some impressive data, but is not the most elegant writer. His ideas do have some force. Upgrade your subscription if you want to read the full post and my whole series on World Crisis or Polycrisis.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
Switching focus a bit, there has been recent attention in the media to the ethnic conflict in Manipur in India. This issue has been presented in the media as a question of whether India or Modi has the democratic traditions or political will to curb ‘Hindu nationalism’ that is implied to be at the base of the violence. For example, The Economist, resurrecting its old imperial traditions, writes that Manipur has been
“the site of a deadly and uncompromising flare-up in one of Asia’s longest-running ethnic conflicts. Though violence is currently subsiding, there seems to be little political will to resolve the underlying conflict, which could boil over again at any time.”
Its journalists evoke the old trope of the ethnic cauldron of less civilized states, and express the liberal Anglophone world’s distaste for Modi’s assertion of Hindu and Indian civilization, especially with an election coming in India in 2024. The Economist, continues
“The violence pits the state’s majority-Hindu Meitei community against its hill tribes, chiefly Christian Kukis. The Meitei, who dominate the valley, including the capital, Imphal, have long claimed that Kukis have been unfairly privileged by their tribal status. The Kukis oppose demands by the Meitei to be included in the state’s list of “scheduled tribes”, which would expand their access to government jobs allocated by tribal quotas, and allow them to settle in tribal areas. Kukis fear this would further strengthen Meitei economic dominance and threaten their own already limited livelihoods.”
This story is an excellent reminder not to rely on current Western media sources to understand any issue with complex historical roots. Beyond the tropes, the violence has been triggered by acts of sexual violence, but also relates to questions of access to land that in turn relate to a complex history, in which British imperial administration plays a large part. There are, however, some excellent podcasts from Indian commentators on this conflict.
The In Focus by The Hindu podcast has an excellent discussion of themost recent outbreak of the Manipur conflict and an earlier podcast on the historical background. Abhijit Chavda hosted an excellenmt discussion, What’s Exactly Happening In Manipur? | Rami Desai & Dr. Bimol Akoijam on Abhijit Chavda Podcast 29. These podcasts demonstrate the value of listening to all parts of the multipolar world, in their own voices, if you want to adopt a mindful approach to history and to see the world more clearly with quality world history.
On this topic, I have now fully loaded my first online course, Mindful History, at Learnworlds. You can check it out here. I will do a separate post soon on the course, including a special offer for substack subscribers.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
On the podcast this week I discuss the large social trends that have remade our societies. Longevity has lengthened and reshaped our lives. Family systems have mingled and adapted to profound changes in fertility and gender relationships. Mass higher education has perversely reinforced or created a shadow form of inequality. If you want to read more I do recommend Emmauel Todd, Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus.
5. What surprised me most this week.
I was astonished by the statement of the US Ambassador to Australia, Josephine Kennedy, who proclaimed with pride that a bad cardboard cutout of a kangaroo decorated in the USA flag was the perfect symbol of the Australia-USA relationship. It is a sign of a decadent oligarchy that such a statement is made. In truth, the trashy kangaroo was high-school stunt, and the blind praise was another act of imperial arrogance spoken by a scion of an American oligarchical political clan.
And then I saw the footage of Senator Mitch McConnell freezing before the cameras in a health incident that betrayed his age and debility. It is not an isolated incident since there is an astonishing number of very old political leaders in the USA: Mitch McConnell (81), Joe Biden (80), Nancy Pelosi (83), Maxine Waters (84) Chuck Grassley (89), Dianne Feinstein (90). There are ancient oligarchs, like George Soros (92), and indispensable diplomats, like Henry Kissinger (100). Kissinger actually visited Xi JinPing, leader of China this week, more than Joe Biden can do.
Peter Turchin claims there is “elite over-production” and intensified competition in America for high status, powerful positions. If true, this production is high quantity and low quality, and the competition is not driving innovation, but entrenching the established. How did the American political system become so ossified that despite elite competition and over-production it is dominated by a long list of people who need to step aside?
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Hrovje Moriç for his interview with me on TNT radio this week and to Hannah Foster, an Australian historian, who will be doing an interview on my podcast in a couple of weeks.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 111. Four Social Changes Unsettling the Modern World
On the YouTube Channel I published a short on the podcast Will Society Collapse, Really? and a video How Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard Led USA to Defeat in Afghanistan and… which was an excerpt from my podcast episode 15 (25 August 2021) on Brzezinski’s role in defining American strategy in Eurasia and Afghanistan.
On Twitter, I responded to a question on politics and reality by Jonathon Cole who produces the Political Animals podcast with this aphorism
Governing can clarify reality. Engaging in politics always distorts reality. Performing modern media obsessed politics manipulates virtual reality, but leaves our lifeworld untouched.
On SubStack I pulled back from the daily 13 days posts, since it felt a little spammy. I hope you don’t mind.
I did an interview with Hrovje Moriç on TNT Radio about Thirteen Ways that I will post in edited form as a YouTube channel next week
I also established an Instagram account (@jeffrichwriter), which is more a day in the life of a writer style
Next week, my podcast will look at social fragmentation and elite competition.
I will be writing the final instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, Social Fragmentation which will deal with how the accelerated cultural and social changes of recent decades can overwhelm us.
On Youtube I will be posting a video overview of my book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and a video on leagues of powers in the international system (who are you if not a superpower?)
I will be starting to promote my online course, Mindful History, and shooting my next course, a masterclass in government writing.
And I will be diving into my next long writing projects, my next collection of poetry, Cantos from a Cage, my book on the ruin of Ukraine, my book on the world crisis, and my book on life after Western democracy.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I have been reading Olga Tokarczuk The Books of Jacob, and will do a podcast or video on her soon as part of a series on Nobel Prize for Literature winners.
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. This week it seems right to end the newsletter with the poem that prompted Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Here are the first three stanzas.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
You can read the whole poem in many collections or here. You can also listen to Stevens read his poem here.
Let me just add from the book this brief descriptioned Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, of the role of this poem in inspiring me
“Stevens’ poem is one of perspective. Each segment of the poem, way of looking at a blackbird, evoked sensations that are fragmentary, incomplete, partial, particular to the viewer, but not restricted to the viewer. The reader of the poem discovers, within the simple reality of the humble blackbird, connections to the enigmas of the universe. I wanted to show how the plain, despised, ordinary life of a bureaucrat, made invisible by the perceptions of outsiders, could be perceived poetically with the insights of an ostracised insider.”
Do buy the whole book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, or at Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
Until next week, take care, and stay sane.