American conservatives hate it. Even the most passionate British conservatives support it. It was conceived by Winston Churchill as far back as 1908, mentioned again in 1924, and laid out as a plank for British reconstruction in his forward-looking “Plan for Postwar Britain” in 1943.

This toxic issue, which turns red blue and blue red when you cross the Atlantic, is Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

Introduced in 1948 by the Labor government of Clement Atlee, it is often thought of in the United States as a socialist idea. Churchill was, in fact, influenced greatly by William Beveridge, a liberal economist who played a key role in the formation of what came to be known as the welfare state, which combined national insurance (social security) with national health insurance.

The Brits, I can attest as a former Brit, love the NHS. They also love to criticize it. It is up there with the weather.

Also, it should be noted, the NHS is not perfect; it is and always will be a work in progress.

So large a system has its failures. Whenever there is one, conservative American friends are quick to send me the bad news — as though a surgical mess-up in Birmingham was a harbinger of the collapse of the entire system.

The NHS has been described as the third rail of British politics.

Clearly, President Trump had never heard that and had the temerity to suggest that the NHS should be part of trade negotiations between the United States and Britain. No, a thousand times no, was the instant reaction of the conservative ministers and former ministers now jostling for election as prime minister.

Any suggestion that the NHS — Britain’s most popular government program — would be in any way subject to commercial interference would doom a British candidate for public office.

How it was that Trump thought he could grab the third rail and get away with it is unknown, but he walked that one back, as they say nowadays, quickly the next day.

Over the years, I have been asked innumerable times about how the Brits do things from public transport to creative theater; from the financing of the BBC to the hobby of racing pigeons. When it comes to the NHS I am never asked; I am told. Liberals tell me it is what we need in the United States: a single-payer system. Conservatives tell me that it is communism and that the Brits get terrible health care.

I am not sure the former is desirable, and I know the latter to be poppycock fed by a fury that is based on misinformation willingly received and willingly disseminated.

I have received care as a young man under the NHS and members of my family have been recipients through the years. I have spent long hours examining various health systems and a good deal of time taking to British doctors and professionals. I have also done the unlikely in this debate: talked to patients.

A dear relative was gravely ill a few years ago. I spent a week at her bedside in a large hospital in Kingston, just outside London. As she was sedated at the time, I had a lot of time to study the place.

It was big with wings specializing in everything from heart failure to eye surgery. It seemed to work pretty well, although the public wards were crowded.

But there were these takeaways: No one was refused, nor would be sent home early, and no surprise bill would come in the mail. My relative had a private health plan on top of the NHS standard and got a private room and good food.

The biggest difference is in cost. Health care spending accounts for 17.9 percent of GDP in the United States, whereas it accounts for just 9.7 percent of GDP in the United Kingdom. Germany, France and Canada all have different systems that come out in the same place as the U.K., with service delivered for money spent.

Structural costs bring our bill up. All those women in your doctor’s office, arguing with insurance companies on the phone over “codes,” are not practicing medicine. They are engaged in a kind of health care roulette: Will they or will they not pay? Is it in the plan?

I am not sure the NHS is right for the United States, but structural overhaul is necessary. Wasted efforts and greed pervade the system.

By the way, I do not have a dog in this fight: I am on Medicare — and that costs the taxpayer too much because of weak controls.

 

 

---

Photo Editorial credit: Sasa Wick / Shutterstock.com. Bournemouth, UK September 01, 2018 South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust keeps their emergency services ready at the Airshow

NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan — Want a world-class legal system known for its integrity? Then go to London and get one, judges and all. That’s what Kazakhstan has done.

When businesses are looking to invest abroad, the availability and dependability of legal redress is a critical consideration. Should things go wrong, companies and hedge funds want to know that they can resolve matters in court, and that their cases will be heard in an impartial and timely fashion.

Kazakhstan, the vast country that straddles the boundary between Asia and Europe, decided it would put its commercial legal system above reproach. In 2015, it imported a whole legal system from England, along with English common law, to deal with commercial issues. It also imported some English judges to sit on the bench.

Presiding over this remarkable court system is Lord Woolf, one of England’s most revered justices and, before that, one of its most eminent barristers.

Kairat Kelimbetov, governor of the Astana International Finance Centre (AIFC), described this to me as a move to establish the “rule of law.” He said it was decisive in improving the investment climate. It’s also symptomatic of a desire here to “do what it takes” to move Kazakhstan to the first row of nations — in this case, to import a legal system complete with eminent jurists.

This sets Kazakhstan, a country still growing out of its years as a Soviet republic, apart from other emerging countries that seek the indigenous over the imported. In Africa, the desire to indigenize has often cost countries heavily.

This philosophy of going out and bringing in what you prize to Kazakhstan, like so much else in the country, reflects the vision of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who upon the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, was elected president of the new country of Kazakhstan, which he led until his resignation this March.

Nazarbayev built this secular, economically thrusting and technologically ambitious country with an authoritative hand, but with a view to adopting and adapting. He was helped by plentiful oil revenues — Kazakhstan produces 1.9 million barrels a day.

The Kazakh managerial class reflects a diversity of elite education from Oxford to Cambridge, Harvard to Stanford, to Moscow, Singapore and Beijing universities. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the constitutional successor to Nazarbayev, has heavy ties to China, and AIFC’s Kelimbetov was educated at Moscow State University and Georgetown University. The effects of that educational spread have informed policymaking and the country’s can-do culture.

Kazakhs go to the polls on June 9, in a presidential election widely expected to endorse the policies of Nazarbayev and to elect Tokayev, a former prime minister and close political ally of Nazarbayev.

In an interview, Tokayev told me that he’d have an increased emphasis on the environment, especially the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland waterway, which has been detrimentally affected by oil drilling, and he’d create an environment ministry.

Although Tokayev is expected to get a huge majority at the polls, he’s facing opposition from six rivals, ranging from a communist to a woman who wants to speak for small business. In fact, gender equality is, to an observer, remarkably well-achieved in Kazakhstan, at least in the capital.

Kazakhstan is challenged by its sheer size and its location. It’s larger than Western Europe, but its population is just 18 million. It’s the world’s 9th-largest country by land mass, and it’s land-locked. It has five contiguous and, at times, contentious neighbors: China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Governing Kazakhstan requires diplomatic agility.

Although oil has financed the growth and the building of this architecturally creative new capital, Tokayev told me he’s going to push energy diversification. Already, the electric sector has embraced solar and wind — a great resource in the country — and is increasing its exports to neighbors.

In short, Tokayev wants future development to embrace the unique size and resources of the country. So, he hopes to make it a transportation hub, an agricultural powerhouse and a technology leader. He also wants Kazakhstan, which, he told me, already accounts for 60 percent of the Central Asian GDP, to be an international financial center.

The country’s premier institution of higher learning, Nazarbayev University, emphasizes STEM, its president, Shigeo Katsu, told me. At the university, too, there’s diverse expertise: the faculty includes 50 nationalities and instruction is in English.

SAN MARCOS, Texas — Uber isn’t finished yet — or, to be precise, the technology that enabled ride sharing, Airbnb, and bicycle and scooter sharing is on the march.

It’s a simple idea, yet fiendishly brilliant: central computer control of an archipelago of often personally owned objects. So it was that private cars were monetized, and spare rooms and vacant apartments started adding to the family income.

Next up may be your roof: It could work if you have a solar panel installed or plan to install one. Rather than, as at present, selling surplus power to the local utility, you may simply sell it to a neighbor or someone else in proximity. This is happening in Australia where electricity shortages have led to radicalization of old concepts of the generation and supply of electricity.

Uber roofs was one of many ideas about the future of electricity at the Digital 360 Summit here: a gathering of those hoping to have a role in the future of the urban and suburban space with transformative digital technologies. It all comes under the rubric of smart cities.

No one is quite sure how all this will work, but an awesome assembly of companies who gathered here on May 21 and 22  tells its own tale. They include AT&T, General Motors, Siemens, National Grid, Sempra Energy, Edison Energy, SAS, Cisco Systems and Oracle.

The event is the brainchild of Andres Carvallo, who heads the management consultants CMG, in collaboration with Texas State University, itself committed to incubating innovative technologies.

All in all, when the mighty gather, it’s reasonable to believe mighty things are afoot: American city infrastructure is in the early throes of change.

The key to it all is the electric supply and the future shape of utilities, and how they manage the changes coming at them. This even as they spend billions of dollars to upgrade their systems. Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, says the infrastructure investment by the investor-owned electric utilities was nearly $1 trillion over the past decade.

Yet that doesn’t mean that the ground isn’t shifting. It is.

In the urban space, we’re seeing an extraordinary assemblage of disparate interests bent on having a piece of the action. Even activists from the Green New Deal see things going their way.

They applaud the emergence of dispersed generation and micro-grids. These are the result of carbon-free generation with wind and solar. It’s these microgrids which could make the Uber roof a possibility. Also, it’s these microgrids that the utilities must accommodate to make sure that if they generate, they pay their share of the electric grid through a standby fee. The grid is like the highway system: It’s there for us whether we drive or fly.

But green enthusiasm doesn’t end with dispersed generation. The Green New Dealers are passionate about smart buildings and making more of the old stock “smart” while having high standards for new buildings. So are the technologists, armed with sensors and data.

Another mighty upheaval is the electrification of transport. Everyone agrees it’s coming, but the issue of charging is still open: Will companies, already up and running, like ChargePoint, inherit that business? Will the utilities, as some have, move into charging or will municipalities, again as some have, get involved? Fast charging, which can fuel an electric car in 30 minutes with direct current, is expensive. Slower charging can take hours and doing it at home from the household supply can take all day or all night.

I was struck by an entrepreneurial startup in San Francisco, ChargeWheel, which offers a truck-mounted charger that will come to you if you’re stuck, or just want to avoid the hassle of finding a station and waiting.

The utilities with smart meters command a lot of vital data that will shape the digitization of the cities. But no firm can think its space in the digital future is reserved for it, including utilities.

Meanwhile, some people will want to turn their roofs into generating stations and, who knows, suburbanites might want to offer charging in their driveways.

Uberization knows no frontiers.

The scramble is joined.

Walkability is the new hot concept in urban planning.

A new generation of urbanites and people who would like to the move from the cul de sac life in the suburbs to downtowns are seeking neighborhoods where they can walk to shops, theaters, restaurants and to see their friends.

Realtors across America are finding they can get a premium for neighborhoods where residents can walk to just about everything.

Studies show that retailers can expect much more business, sometimes as much as 80 percent more, if they have more, regular foot traffic.

Walking, to its proponents, means living lighter on the earth with less pollution, better health, a sense of close community and an air of enlightenment.

Neighborhoods like Dupont Circle in Washington and Brooklyn Heights in New York are adding walkability to the list of their virtues. But it is a phenomenon being experienced across the country and the world.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan wants to make London the most walkable city in the world, which may be news to those who already think it is a pretty good place for a stroll. But his plans go far beyond tourists marching around the sights or trying to get to Buckingham Palace from their hotel.

Khan seeks an organic change that links walking, cycling and public transport together in a unified way of getting around without cars. He has appointed a commissioner for walking and cycling, Will Norman, to oversee the new London mobility.

American cities are responding to the walkability imperative with initiatives of their own, driven by changing values and concepts.

To me, it seems like a giant back-to-the-future movement where the virtues now claimed for walkability are really the virtues of village life.

So, whether it is in San Diego or Baltimore, a new desire to abandon the car for the street is changing the way we live and what we think is the good life.

It is a part of a large urban adjustment that is underway; although the purists might want to see it as having no technological component beyond the new soles on shoes.

You cannot, as London has found, simply push walking without regard to cycling. And you cannot, as cities from coast to coast have done, put in bike lanes and permit those pesky scooters without regard to their impact on pedestrians.

More: Bikes themselves are changing dramatically. The cost of electric-assist bikes has tumbled from many thousands of dollars to around $1,000. Around Seattle, there are bike paths that call for one to be extremely athletic, as I recall.

Walkability, as an urban concept, reflects not only a new sensibility to the environment, but also a desire to regain a sense of the cosmopolitan life. Increasingly, as the malls are failing, we are deprived of the collective living experience.

The growth of the suburbs increased dependence on cars and bifurcated social life into business friends (lunch friends) and neighborhood friends (cookout friends).

Going forward, as the walkability ethic takes hold and more entrepreneurs see its potential, we will see walking communities clustered around transport centers, like subway stops; and, most likely, more short-distance commuting options, such as the light rail operating in Baltimore and San Diego.

Over the decades, I have been watching efforts to have people live where they work with planned communities like Reston, Va., near Washington. I once lived in Reston and that part of the plan never quite worked for it. People still commute to work, sometimes great distances, but with walkability as an urban goal, this trend may finally reverse.

What we do not need, in my view, is too much social engineering, which may be about to engulf London under its socialist mayor.

Bernard Shaw, the playwright, said of H.G. Wells, the author and a fellow socialist, that Wells would cut down the trees to build metal sunshades. That is the danger if walkability gets politicized and mandated. Walkability needs gentle footfalls, not imperatives.

Why no jubilation?

You’d have thought the agreement between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and President Trump to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure would cause wild celebration.

Why, then, didn’t the church bells ring out, the fireboats send arcs of water into the air, and the stock of the construction companies, steel producers, asphalt purveyors and paint makers soar? It’s because nobody believed that we have the political coordination — sometimes expressed as political will — to do the deed and find the money.

Some money will be found eventually — after some disaster like the collapse of a bridge on an essential highway, or the failure of one of the critical tunnels under the Hudson River, which carry people and goods up and down the East Coast.

It’s the equivalent of “I’ll mind what I eat after my heart attack” kind of thinking.

The infrastructure from airports to ports, roads to bridges is in parlous shape. We are a First World nation, with Third World ways of moving ourselves and our goods.

Even if the Congress found the money through acceptable taxes (an oxymoron) or acceptable program cuts (another oxymoron), years of squabbling will ensue between the states, between their congressional sponsors, with every locality on bended knee with its begging bowl raised high.

Yet the national infrastructure is due to get a powerful boost not from Washington, but rather from the Internet of Things.

Forces are amassing remake cities, and in so doing to reimagine the infrastructure.

These forces are the companies, academics and visionaries who see a future city where drones will deliver packages, automobiles will connect with each other and eventually will be driverless, as they speed down highways that’ve been modified for them.

WiFi will be available everywhere and traffic will flow better not because of new highways but because its management will be outsourced to computers that will adjust traffic flows, change lights and direct interconnected cars to take the least-congested route.

Think GPS navigation that can control the journey automatically. Vehicles might suggest a route for you, warn you that the car, two spaces ahead, is weaving or that there’s an impending thunderstorm. This ability of cars and other vehicles to “talk” to each other is known as connectivity. Many of the features of this future conversation between vehicles and their environment are already being built into new cars.

It isn’t in use yet: Your car has a brain waiting to be engaged.

Potholes won’t vanish, but they’ll be identified as soon as they appear and near-automated machines will be dispatched to fill them.

The future of infrastructure is that it’ll be digitally managed to make it more efficient and to predict failures accurately. It won’t build bridges, tunnels, seaports or clear blocked canals. What it may do is move the needle in subtle ways.

More important will be the political impact of the big-company lobbies that will be unleashed across the political spectrum from the White House, to Congress, to the state capitals and the city halls. Big lobbies tend to get their way — and they will when companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, Uber and Lime are demanding upgrades to the infrastructure to accommodate their digitized world.

At present, infrastructure rejuvenation is a political wish list. Soon it will get teeth, tech teeth.

Most important for the future of cities — from better lights and first responder systems to automated buses and ride-share vehicles — will be the sense that things are moving.

History shows us that the public is hungry for the new, less so for repairs. Look at the history of Apple and how product after product, from tablets to phones to watches, has been snatched up. Now think of that hunger applied to a smart city that will have exciting new technology, making them more livable and, it is hoped, more loveable.

Think of the coming infrastructure surge as the technological gentrification of cities.

It’s the tech giants and their lobbyists, abetted by public demand, who’ll redirect White House and congressional thinking about infrastructure in a world in which the invisible highways of the internet will be controlling the old visible and familiar ones.

The internet controls the vertical and the horizontal, so to speak.

Not since Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and The Heritage Foundation cooked up the Contract with America in 1994, has there been such a clever piece of political stagecraft as the Green New Deal.

But whereas the Gingrich plan was able to make its way untrammeled through the congressional election and, in many of its goals, into law, the Green New Deal is by its nature more political theater than legislative agenda.

The Green New Deal is a crummy document, featuring many old and failed ideas from the past — stretching back to the 19th century. But as a banner, it is effective; as a call to arms, it works.

What its Republican critics have wrong is that in cleaving to the White House line on global warming, they underestimate the degree of real alarm that aberrant weather, more severe hurricanes, rising sea levels and daily reports of catastrophic ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic will engender.

A television video of a starving polar bear, whose sea ice habitat is under threat from climate change, has an incalculable effect on public alarm. But that bear and the bad news of rising water in Miami, Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco cannot be denied and will be present at the balloting in 2020.

The Green New Deal document is too broad, too idealistic and too weakly drafted to be taken seriously as legislation. But as propaganda, it is brilliant.

As presented by the Democratic House-Senate duo of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, it is more than an environmental wish list. It is a far-left social and environmental game plan. It is a call to reorder, re-engineer and convert our society from what we drive to what we eat. It delves into the crypt of failed socialist ideas and brings out the cadavers, like the one of a living, guaranteed wage.

Sadly, the Green New Deal will hang some of these old, failed ideas around the necks of many of the Democratic presidential hopefuls — at least five have uncritically endorsed it.

Recently, I went to hear one of those contenders, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. In a few words, she impressed me; then, in a few more, she appalled me.

As someone who has served two deployments in the Middle East, as an enlisted woman and as an officer, Gabbard has something to say about foreign policy: She says no more wasteful foreign wars. But as an environmental champion, she has swallowed whole the weary fictions of the left.

Gabbard determines all electricity should be generated by renewables, defined as solar and wind. For good measure she throws in a denunciation of nuclear power, concentrating on the abandoned San Onofre plant, between Los Angeles and San Diego. To make her point, she says the waste would last for 500,000 years, which should get a sharp rebuke from scientists.

Nuclear, she should be told, is progressive. It is science at the beginning of its age of discovery with new products and ideas swirling around as they have not since the 1950s. Small, factory-built reactors with various new technologies are being readied for market. The Holy Grail of nuclear fusion is closer than ever.

The science of carbon capture and storage, she should also be told, is evolving.

The green world needs to know that wind and solar are limited in that they cannot produce more power than they reap. Solar is confined by the amount of sun that falls on a given collector, wind by the amount of ambient breeze blowing though one windmill. That is guaranteed by the second law of thermodynamics.

Nonetheless, the message of the framing-word green in the Green New Deal is a clear call to arms. The rest of it should be put down to Ocasio-Cortez’s youth and inexperience and Markey’s foggy hopes.

But that does not mean that the next election will not, to rephrase a Clinton slogan, hinge on “It’s the climate, stupid.” The Green New Deal makes a nifty bumper sticker.

 

 

---

Photo: Washington, DC. USA. 12.10.18- Hundreds of young people occupy Representative offices to pressure the new Congress to support a committee for a Green New Deal. Editorial credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

There is a persistent belief that business people are what you need in the Oval Office. It was one of the credentials on Donald Trump’s resume.

That, too, may be one of the underlying weaknesses of Trump’s presidency.

When Trump was elected, he thought he was the new proprietor of the United States, as though he had bought it in a deal. He had paid his money and acquired a new company: Donald Trump, chairman, chief executive officer and majority stockholder.

Trump came to Washington to run his new company. He won, as he likes to say, and the United States was his with which to do what he liked, where his whim was law. Pull out of a treaty, abrogate an agreement, decide the moral acceptability of the sexual preferences of the staff, and fire, fire, fire.

Rupert Murdoch — Trump’s man Friday in the media — famously said he had the right to say what was published in his newspapers. He asserted a kind of divine right of the proprietor; a concept that was eroding as the concept of the newspaper as a public service was gaining ground. Murdoch was not interested in the public service approach. Neither is Trump. They sit next to each other in the pea pod of history.

Trump’s view of the presidency as a proprietorship, the wholly owned property of the CEO, is seen in his actions and even more in his frustrations. If he were sitting atop a giant corporation, his word would be law; he could hire and fire at will, dictate a course of action and maybe retract it. The boss gets what the boss wants, particularly if it is a privately held outfit, like the Trump real estate empire.

Clearly, Trump thought that was what he would do when he took over the United States. His attempts to govern by fiat illustrate that frustration.

Trump, who is not a reader, had not schooled himself in the realities of governance, the give and take of Washington, the grand negotiation that is democracy, imperfect but purposeful — the great purpose being the republic and its well-being.

The organizing principle of a business is profit: It must take in more money than it spends. In real estate you bet against rising demand, borrow and buy. That is not a guide as to how to run the United States, or any other country.

The assets and liabilities balance differently. For example, NATO is an asset and Russia a liability.

Statesmen want to project power rather than use it. Trump wants to use it, to have dominion over the whole government and allies. He wants Congress to act only as permissive board of directors, not an equal partner. If the deal fails, he wants to be able to walk away. In government, and especially in international relations, you cannot walk away. The deal is nonetheless your deal, your failure.

I have watched other business people come to Washington and make, on a smaller scale, the same mistakes. They failed to understand the system; that to get things done you bend the system, not break it.

These, the benders, are the consummate Washington hands, often with institutional memories. They are the ones who get things done.

There is another side to this coin, and that is that no knowledge of business is a detriment to a leader. Sen. George McGovern, D-South Dakota, after his unsuccessful bid to win the 1972 presidential election, lamented that he wished he had understood business better when he was candidate lashing out at big business.

Lashing out at business is a standard approach by today’s Democratic hopefuls. It does not sit well with a lot of voters, particularly as most are employed by business. Those who think that kicking posterior is all that is needed in Washington are as wrong as those who think that business needs a boot in the same place.

The C suite does not fit in the Oval Office but, conversely, politicians have often been ignorant of the disciplines of business. Some tension is constructive; too much, and the nation loses.

Socialism is a toxic word, and so its happy adoption by some of the new stars of the Democratic left is to handle something that might blow up with lethal political consequences.

Words are the materiel of politics: its artillery, its infantry and its minefield, packed with unstable incendiary devices; hence the potency of one word, socialism.

Trouble is neither the opponents, who hold out anything to do with socialism as a plague that will engulf and destroy, nor the new wave of endorsers seem to have a clear idea of what socialism means. For the Democratic left it means the Nordic countries, which, according to the old definitions of socialism, are not socialist. They are capitalist democracies with advanced social welfare.

Socialism, classic socialism, had at its bedrock a concept that is now curiously old and irrelevant, like a gas lamp. Socialism, in classic definition, states simply that the means of production should be owned by the workers — understandable in the 19th century and now a historical relic.

Karl Marx extended the struggle between workers and owners to embrace all of society as a great class battle between the workers and the owners; a struggle that embraced all aspects of endeavor.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized on this as a means of total control. The state, representing the workers, would control everything and so a small cadre at the top could dominate as thoroughly and effectively as any emperor or monarch ever had, in fact more so.

Joseph Stalin dragged the idealism of the earlier communism down further and added a massive state apparatus of suppression and industrial-scale brutality.

In the hands of 19th-century socialists, like the Englishman Sidney Webb and his wife, Beatrice, who gave us the phrase “collective bargaining,” socialism was humanitarianism as a political system. Harsh events and evil men overtook them.

Communism failed in the botched Soviet Union, and even the word mostly came down with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Only Cuba and few other far, far left states clung to the appellation communist. China remains avowedly communist, but it has evolved into an autocratic mercantilism, far from Marx, Lenin and the rest.

Venezuela tried communism and called it socialism.

All of Africa after the colonial withdrawal went for what they called socialist government and failed awfully. The new leaders were not so much attracted to the enlightenment of the Webbs or of the theories of Marx as to the lure of controlling everything. From the Limpopo River (South Africa’s northern border) to the Nile, they failed disastrously.

Those who cling to the word socialism, besides Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), himself a durable anachronism, tempt to be tarred with the brush of the failed states, like Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Words play tricks with policy and they should be treated like munitions, useful in the battle but hazardous later. For example, whatever happened to the working class? They morphed into the middle class, and in so doing lost their old power base, the trade unions.

President Trump’s common-man populism is no substitute for a working union with its upward wage pressure, job security and healthcare. But unionism has lost its way, and the unions themselves have not found a new footing in the political firmament.

The Democratic left, which is in ascendancy, needs a new vocabulary to fit its goals. If it wishes, as it seems, to emulate the successful countries that lie along the Baltic Sea, it needs to define its goals outside of the old lingo of socialism. It should articulate its new tangible vision of a more equitable future, untainted with the toxic limitations of the past.

For the Republicans, though, socialism is the gift that has given and keeps on giving. It is the weapon of choice, made more potent by failures in countries that defined themselves as socialist.

In the battle of 2020, Venezuela is a conservative asset. If Sanders and the shining star of the left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, keep the appellation socialism alive, that is a laurel tied around the GOP’s best weapon.

Can one mourn a building, cry for it as one weeps for a loved one? Yes, if this loved one is Notre Dame Cathedral.

I am mourning after the fire which gutted the great structure. I am choked, hurting, in sorrow.
No other cathedral or church has so touched me. I have seen my share of great places of Christian worship in and near Paris, from the Sacre Coeur basilica to the Chartres Cathedral. I have seen the cathedral in Florence, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and churches, churches everywhere in Italy. The English cathedrals are well known to me: Westminster, St. Paul’s, Canterbury, Wells and York (known as the York Minster).

But it is on the Ile de la Cite, in the middle of the Seine River in Paris, that I found, for me, the middle of Christendom.

Cry the beloved building, sitting there for more than eight centuries, witness to everything: war, plague, revolution, the crowning of the Emperor Napoleon, and conquest. And, let us not forget, the setting for one of the great novels of all time, Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” published in 1831.

For me, visiting Notre Dame for the first of many visits was to feel humanity’s eternal striving for God; striving in a space where it was possible to believe. That is not to say that, for some, every holy site is place for that, but I sensed it the first time I first went through the massive doors decades ago, and the many times since then.

Notre Dame with its flying buttresses, ribbed vaulting and leering gargoyles was, for me, the ultimate religious structure; man’s finest architecture, craftsmanship and imagination let loose in the confines of medieval expectations. It had dignity, function and innovation, and supreme commitment to purpose — the whole building a prayer.

Winston Churchill said we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. Notre Dame has shaped France since medieval times, even as it has undergone its own struggles. It was ravaged by fire — but not a badly as now — and had fallen into disrepair and disrespect before Victor Hugo turned it into the most famous church ever through a story of love and pain, of mob violence, of betrayal, of sanctuary and, ultimately, of love unto death.

Hugo wrote his novel to save the cathedral. He was appalled by the disappearing medieval architecture of Paris. Hugo more than saved Notre Dame: He gave it to the world. From being the great cathedral of Paris, it became the cathedral of the world: a place where millions upon millions of people could seek a brief sanctuary from daily life.

Once I had climbed up some stairs in Notre Dame and heard the most extraordinary noise. It sounded as though the cathedral was being attacked by locusts. Then I saw the noisemakers in the nave: a tour group of Japanese, respectfully photographing without flash.

It seems that Notre Dame will be rebuilt, and it should be, but for me, it will have lost something — that sense of more than eight centuries of mankind’s striving to find God and possibly for some succeeding.

When the age of communication started (pick your time, but I think it was when we started sending print by telephone in the form of a fax), it was thought that dictators would fall, and democracy would be reinvigorated.

The first big disappointment was Saudi Arabia. When the Saudis began to get uncensored news and information, it was believed that the grip of the royal family and its extreme religious allies would be loosened. It did not happen. Instead, Saudi Arabia was spurred to use its oil wealth to push conservative Islam around the globe, especially in places where it was present but could be radicalized, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. They poured their money into madrassas — religious schools — that preached the Wahhabism, a strict and puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam.

When Iran, a majority Shia country, was under the dictatorial thumb of the shah, it was thought that the Iranians, a sophisticated people with an ancient and proud history, would be liberalized by the flow of Western, secular ideas. These ideas came into the country through the presence of visitors and contractors, and a liking for movies and television.

Fax transmission was important in the spread of ideas in Iran. But the faxes that had an effect were not those preaching democracy but those coming from an old Shia cleric living in exile in a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He used the fax to push the Islamic Revolution.

People ask me why, when the mainstream media daily points up President Donald Trump’s failures and transgressions, his supporters are unmoved, disdaining what is being revealed in favor of what they want to believe. They believe in Trump and they believe in his courtiers at Fox News Channel and on talk radio.

People do not react to raw information but, rather, to information that sits well with them for other reasons: what they are predisposed to believe.

Rupert Murdoch, the boss of Fox News, has had a genius, a real genius, for corralling those who felt ignored by society. He did it in Britain with his hugely successful tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and he has done it here with Fox News. In Britain and in the United States, he found and exploited a nativism that both countries had forgotten they had.

Fox News did not invent Trump; instead, the shoe fit. In Britain, The Sun did not invent Brexit. But when it came along, The Sun was ready to lead the charge — and it did.

How we react to the news depends on our involvement with it in tertiary ways. If you were already convinced of British exceptionalism, you would move toward the hostility to Europe expressed in The Sun. If you think immigrants take jobs, speak strange languages and are usurping our Americanism, you will be gung-ho for Trump’s southern border wall.

In the 1990s you could find, and I did, from Nicaragua to Zimbabwe, old-line communists lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union. They argued that it had not been given a chance. These people really believed that all that was wanted was more of what did not work.

If you are a Trump supporter, you are genuinely amazed that the mainstream media cannot see that what he is doing is great. Democrats and renegade Republicans, like columnist George Will, can find nothing, absolutely nothing, good in the Trump presidency.

People, including AOL founder Steve Case, talked idealistically about the internet in the days when it was getting going as the great, new democratic tool; a boon to global democracy. Wrong. If anything, it stirred up a destructive nationalism.

Information, I have noticed as a journalist who has worked on three continents, does not necessarily shape political opinion.

Political opinion tends to find the media that agree with it, not the other way. But after the two have mated, media can inflame its public partner. Good for two-party rivalry, but not for elucidation.

 

 

 

---

Photo: LAN-UDE, RUSSIA – FEBRUARY 20: Young family watching Russian President Vladimir Putin on TV on February 20, 2015 in Ulan-Ude. Editorial credit: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock.com