Crawling Between the Giants’ Toes

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Speaking in the U.K. in late 2019, Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister and one of the most prominent members of the European Union’s parliament, had this to say to his audience: “The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It is a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation, it’s a civilization. India is not a nation. The U.S. is also an empire, more than a nation. . . . The world of tomorrow is a world of empires in which we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together, in a European framework and in the European Union.”

In “Too Small to Fail,” Swiss writer and investor R. James Breiding takes a different tack, arguing that if “size has become unmoored from power,” if “greater social cohesion results in more easily governable and economic[ally] efficient societies,” if “technology is causing the speed of change to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, then the future will favour smaller, nimbler and more cohesive societies.” The corollary of that logic is that the behemoths should shrink. “Why shouldn’t Californians seek independence?” he writes at one point. And Mr. Breiding is not entirely optimistic about the future of the EU.

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Myself, Ourselves, Others

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When the French writer Thomas Clerc’s Interior (Intérieur, 2013) was released in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation in 2018 (the paperback appeared last year), the headline writer for its New York Times review asked whether “a list of someone’s stuff [could] double as literature?”1 Well, yes. An accurate accumulation of, to philistines, superfluous detail is something I have always relished in a book, whether fictional, factual, or in the case of Interior, a blend of both. If the detail concerns “stuff” (I prefer “possessions,” although Clerc lets slip a handful of “stuffs” himself), so much the better: I was thrilled to read about his “superb” keychain. Perhaps I should disclose that I was a stamp collector. For decades.

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On the Bleach

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Long periods of social isolation can lead to insanity. When I turned to Twitter one day last week and found that the trending items under “politics” included #Lysol, #DisinfectantInjection and the surely superfluous #DontDrinkBleach, I began to think that hallucinations were setting in. A link led me to this headline:

“Lysol and Dettol manufacturer tells customers not to inject disinfectants as possible treatment for COVID-19.”

What?

Then I saw this:

#DisinfectantDonnie

Ah.

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Facing New Crises, Macron Repackages Old, Bad Ideas

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At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

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Corona Conspiracies

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Say what you will about Carl Jung, myth-spinning Swiss sage, madman, and psychiatrist, but he wasn’t always (completely) wrong. Writing in the middle of the last century, he noted how:

The Middle Ages, antiquity, and prehistory have not died out, as the “enlightened” suppose, but live on merrily in large sections of the population. Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst and are unknown only to those whose rationalistic education has alienated them from their roots.

Sadly, that argument falls apart in the second half of the second sentence, perhaps even more than when those words were first published. In an era of apocalyptic environmentalism, revived Marxism, and goop, mythology and magic are finding dismayingly large audiences among those given the benefit of, at least nominally, a rationalist education.

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Back to the Future: The Return of the Euro-zone Crisis?

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In 2011, amid controversy over the euro zone’s bailouts for Greece and other casualties, Germany’s head of state, President Christian Wulff, did what German politicians — and, even more so, a German president — are not meant to do. He said the unsayable:

Solidarity is the core of the European Idea, but it is a misunderstanding to measure solidarity in terms of willingness to act as guarantor or to incur shared debts. With whom would you be willing to take out a joint loan, or stand as guarantor? For your own children? Hopefully yes. For more distant relations it gets a bit more difficult . . .

The unsayable is even more unsayable when it is true. Brussels may look down on the nation-state as dangerous anachronism, but it is, however imperfectly, a family in a way that the EU is not. The European “family” did not exist in 2011, and it does not exist in 2020. None of this is to deny that there is a certain degree of fellow-feeling among the EU’s “citizens,” but for most of them, it only goes so far, which was Wulff’s point. To Bavarians, Saxons are family in a way that Greeks are not.

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Cuomo’s Moment?

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The fact that I am writing this from home, in a New York City that has been more or less shut down, with the National Guard checked into neighboring hotels and, just a few blocks away, Gotham’s principal conference center hosting an emergency hospital, is a reminder that to dismiss almost anything these days as an impossibility is unwise. And so, yes, it is possible that Andrew Cuomo could be chosen as the Democratic nominee at whatever sort of convention the party is able to hold in Milwaukee in August. But it is also extremely unlikely.

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Setting a Precedent

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Whether Britain’s COVID-19 lockdown will be worth what it will cost — a bill involving far more than just money — was and is, for now, unknowable. That it would be used as an excuse by empowered authoritarians to go even further than highly intrusive regulations allowed them to go was, by contrast, all too predictable. When the state is given a mile, its rank and file will generally add a few inches all of their own. Between them, police and local bureaucrats have already distinguished themselves with stunts such as pulling over cars to check if their drivers are on “appropriate” journeys, dyeing a beautiful lake black to discourage visitors, and deeming Easter eggs “non-essential” purchases.

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Health versus Wealth Is a False Choice

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Deciding how and, critically, when, to put America back to work again after the COVID-19 shutdowns has, all too often, been framed as a debate between green eyeshade and stethoscope. Or, to put it another way, risking lives to put a few points on the Dow. Today’s appalling unemployment data are a reminder that describing the choice in that way is to play politics with a pandemic, and to avoid confronting the daunting dilemmas that will be involved in finding the right time to sound some sort of All Clear.

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After the Iceberg

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The economic numbers are beginning to come in, and, predictably enough, just about wherever you check, they are appalling. In Pennsylvania alone last week there were more than 350,000 first-time claims for unemployment assistance. That compares with (seasonally adjusted) initial national claims over the last year averaging in the low 200,000s, and the news is only going to get worse in Pennsylvania and, probably, every other state. Brokerage research, usually a reliable source of good cheer until well past the last moment, now makes for bleak reading. On Friday, Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. GDP would tumble by an annualized 24 percent in the second quarter (against earlier expectations of a 5 percent hit). A pandemic has consequences and so do the measures taken to contain it. This week Morgan Stanley ratcheted up the gloom, forecasting an annualized 30 percent GDP decline in a second quarter when unemployment could hit nearly 14 percent. Tracking the course of these projections shows how rapidly the mood is darkening, and expectations play no small role in driving the economy.

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