The rise of right-wing populism, Will Solfiac argues, stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration:
If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this.
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The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter.
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I think that this failure to reform is an example of one of the most important and interesting tendencies that you can observe in history: when a system collapses because its ruling elite obstinately clings to an ideology that is no longer fit for purpose.
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In the early 16th century the Mamluk rulers of Egypt came under attack from the expansionist Ottoman empire. While the Ottoman armies, particularly the elite janissary corps, were enthusiastic adopters of firearms, the Mamluks disdained firearms, viewing them as dishonourable.
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The aristocracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained the “golden liberty” of their nobles’ commonwealth from the 16th century until the partitions of the late 18th century. This ensured extensive privileges for themselves, including the liberum veto — the right for any noble to nullify all legislation passed in a sejm parliamentary session. It also ensured a weak, elected monarch under the control of the nobles. This system was justified as protecting against the “tyranny” that existed in centralised states like France, but it also meant that the Commonwealth had no central state that could have supported a modern army, making it increasingly vulnerable to encroachments by its centralising neighbours like Sweden and Russia.
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In the lead-up to the American Civil War, the doctrine of states’ rights was frequently employed by the South. The constitution of the Confederacy, in its very first line, replaced “in order to form a more perfect union” with “each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government”. During the war, this doctrine seriously impeded the war effort. A famous example was Georgia’s governor Joseph E. Brown’s attempts to stop Georgia’s troops being used out of state. Brown also opposed central conscription, as did Zebulon Vance of North Carolina.
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The Moriori of the Chatham Islands, who had branched off from the Maori hundreds of years earlier, were invaded by two Maori tribes from the north island of New Zealand in 1835. Michael King’s 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered describes how over the centuries the Moriori had developed a doctrine of nonviolence, with conflicts being resolved by ritual combat which would stop at the first sight of blood.
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In 1912 Tibet gained its independence from the collapsing Qing empire. During this period, the 13th Dalai Lama (r. 1895 to 1933), who had previously lived in exile and had become aware of how dangerously far behind his country was falling, attempted reform. He made strenuous efforts to modernise, introducing Western style education and improving the military and taxation systems. However, these efforts were resisted by the powerful monasteries, who resented the taxes and considered the reforms to be anti-Buddist, and these efforts foundered in the mid 1920s. In his final testament of 1933, the Dalai Lama warned of the coming destruction of Tibet’s traditions and identity if they could not defend their land.
Ringers are a cheat code for democracy. Once one party controls the courts, you get ringers.
Middle-aged people can wonder whether they will live long enough to see the collapse of the AIPAC-USA-Epstein coalition. Meanwhile, even if the coalition is ultimately doomed, it is still effective enough to drag out the war in Iran and Lebanon.
If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to America or Americans to immigrate to Australia or Southern Italians to immigrate to Africa as easily as Mexicans move into Texas or Indians move into Canada or Chinese move into Australia. It isn’t, because it isn’t. Quod erat demonstrandum.