Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Jackson’
“Populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities”…
… and, as Rachel Kleinfeld explains, that doesn’t work out well for their economies…
In the 20th century, economic and political systems could be situated on a simple 2×2 grid. Economic policies ran from left to right, while political systems could be arrayed from authoritarian to democratic.
Most U.S. business pegged themselves easily on this spectrum: they wanted favorable regulation and management-friendly policies of the sort generally pursued by the right. And while a few opened up shop behind the Iron Curtain, CEOs knew business prospered most under classically liberal democratic systems that upheld the rule of law and inalienable rights—including property rights.
The rise of populism in the 21st century has overturned this game board. Today, even supposedly right-wing populists exploit distrust, pessimism, and anger to make the case that government should wield a heavy—and often retaliatory—hand in markets. But while such interference by authoritarian leaders could once be portrayed as undemocratic, modern populists often bask in electoral support. Voters cheer as their elected leaders undermine rights and the rule of law.
Populism, in other words, has shaken the kaleidoscope of 20th century political and economic identities—and acting as if those labels still apply could be catastrophic for market economies. Modern populists from the right use right-wing rhetoric to sell what used to be left-wing economic ideas. And many marry the electoral aspects of democracy with authoritarian tactics to undermine the rights, institutions, and norms that create a stable business environment.
Economic and historical studies show that even supposedly pro-business populism is bad for business; countries that elect one populist tend to elect others, its effects creep well past a single election cycle.
This matters because populists are getting elected at a rate last seen in the 1930s. In 2018, they presided over nearly a third of global GDP, including mega-countries like India. Next year, with 40 countries (accounting for 44% of global GDP) going to the polls, they could control even more. Some come from the left, particularly in Latin America. But as in the turbid 1930s, many populist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States hail from the right—deploying a trio of political strategies that characterize populists regardless of their avowed ideology.
First, populists win elections by deepening existing social divisions. By turning nearly every political question into a fight between a virtuous “us” and a deceitful, dangerous, disloyal “them” they create an intense base that is personally loyal to the leader and not any particular ideology. That base lets populists maintain strong voter support even as they centralize and personalize power, their second go-to tactic. Finally, by redefining democracy as majority rule, they can claim that anything that stands against their desires (as the embodiment of the majority) is anti-democratic. This rhetorical jujitsu lets them undermine checks and balances, once-independent institutions from judiciaries to statistical bodies, and the rule of law itself, depicting them as obstacles to taking radical steps to implement the majority’s wishes.
The dire economic effects of left-wing populism are well-researched. Leaders from Argentina’s Juan Perón to Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador nationalize businesses, politicize their management, and fill their ranks with supportive political appointees. They shower voters with government money come election time and overheat their economies. The result is often a short-term economic boom followed by a long, inflationary bust…
Using Victor Orbán and Hungary as an example, Kleinfeld demonstrates that right-wing populists are just as disastrous for their countries; the problem is not that the leader comes from the left or the right, it’s that they pursue the populist playbook.
Eminently worth reading in full. Aspiring autocrats keep ruining their countries’ economies: “The Economic Cost of Right-Wing Populism,” from @RachelKleinfeld in @JoinPersuasion.
[Image above from the co-published version of the article]
Apposite: Zeynep Tufekci with a diagnosis of the attractiveness of autocratic leaders: “A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.” (gift article). Not sure that I buy her sense that Trump has been working a careful and canny strategy from the start (2016); but her focus is on his adherents’ grievances and their response to his charisma and his self-anointed status as “the only one who can save [us]”… a provocative read.
* Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?
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As we contemplate civics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that pioneering political cartoonist Thomas Nast gave the Democratic Party its mascot:
On January 15, 1870, Nast published the cartoon [see below] that would forever link the donkey to the Democrat. A few ideas should be clear for the cartoon to make sense: First, “republican” and “democrat” meant very different things in the 19th century than they do today (but that’s another article entirely); “jackass” pretty much meant the exact same thing then that it does today; and Nast was a vocal opponent of a group of Northern Democrats known as “Copperheads.”
In his cartoon, the donkey, standing in for the Copperhead press, is kicking a dead lion, representing President Lincoln’s recently deceased press secretary (E.M. Stanton). With this simple but artfully rendered statement, Nast succinctly articulated his belief that the Copperheads, a group opposed the Civil War, were dishonoring the legacy of Lincoln’s administration. The choice of a donkey –that is to say, a jackass [understood at the time to be a play on “Jackson,” as populist Andrew Jackson was an inspiration to the Copperheads]– would be clearly understood as commentary intended to disparage the Democrats. Nast continue to use the donkey as a stand-in for Democratic organizations, and the popularity of his cartoons through 1880s ensured that the party remained inextricably tied to jackasses…
“Political Animals: Republican Elephants and Democratic Donkeys”- Smithsonian
“Her Majesty’s government should do nothing to place in peril our opium revenues. As for preventing the manufacturing of opium, and the sale of it in China, that is far beyond your power.”*
An excerpt from Linda Jaivin‘s The Shortest History of China…
European traders had been trying to get a foothold in China for centuries. As eager as the Europeans were for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, the Chinese remained indifferent to European goods. The Qing restricted access to ports, confining foreign merchants to Guangzhou (Canton), from October to March. Foreign traders resented this, as well as having to work with licensed Chinese intermediaries and abide by local law. In 1793, the British sent an experienced diplomat, Lord George Macartney, to Qianlong’s court carrying a letter arguing for greater access to the empire’s markets, including a reduction in tariffs, the ability of merchants to live in China year-round, and the stationing of an ambassador in Beijing.
The eighty-year-old Qianlong agreed to receive the Englishman at his imperial hunting lodge at Chéngdé, northeast of Beijing. The protocol of an imperial audience demanded a kowtow. Macartney refused, instead bowing on one knee before Qianlong, just as he did with his own sovereign, King George III. Qianlong received him courteously anyway, but once Macartney left and his letter was translated, Qianlong instructed his ministers to bolster the Qing’s coastal defenses, predicting that England, ‘fiercer and stronger than other countries in the Western Ocean,’ might ‘stir up trouble.’ To Macartney he prefaced his reply by saying that the Qing had everything it needed in abundance: ‘I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.’
The British East India Company, which enjoyed a British monopoly on East Asian trade, had something for which at least some Chinese had use: opium, grown in British-controlled India. Opium was already cultivated in China, but in small quantities — soldiers and manual laborers relied on it for pain relief, and some of the idle rich smoked it for pleasure. In 1729, the British sold two hundred chests of opium into China, each containing almost sixty kilograms of the drug. In 1790, three years before Macartney’s visit, they sold 4,054 chests. That number increased steadily.
Qianlong retired in 1796 in a gesture of filial piety, not wanting his reign to outlast that of his revered grandfather, Kangxi. This left the problem of opium to his successor, Jiāqìng (r. 1796-1820).
In 1815, the British sent another envoy, Lord Amherst, to Beijing. Jiāqìng expelled him after another tussle over the kowtow.
Opium addiction began to damage the fabric of Chinese society. The illegal trade fostered corruption, and silver drained from the imperial coffers. Debate raged in the court of Jiāqìng and his successor, Dàoguāng (r. 1821-1850), over whether to legalize opium — encouraging domestic production and limiting trade-related corruption — or ban it. In 1838, Daoguang decided on prohibition. In March 1839, the emperor sent the official Lín Zéxú (1785-1850) to Guangzhou, the hub of the opium trade, to implement the ban. By July, Lin had arrested thousands of addicts and confiscated almost twenty-three thousand kilos of opium, as well as seventy thousand pipes.
Lín Zéxú demanded that the 350 or so foreign traders in Guangzhou surrender their opium. As tensions rose, he locked them in their warehouses. Chinese soldiers blew horns and banged gongs to increase the pressure on them. It took six weeks, but the foreigners handed over twenty thousand chests. Now in possession of almost 1.4 million kilos of opium, Lín Zéxú had it mixed with water, salt, and lime and flushed out to sea.
In response, British warships blockaded the entrance to Guangzhou’s harbor, smashed through Chinese defenses, and captured ports including Shanghai and Ningbo, blocking maritime traffic on the Grand Canal and lower Yangtze. This became known as the First Opium War.
Under duress, the Qing signed the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which granted the British access to Guangzhou, Shanghai, and three other ‘treaty ports.’ It also ceded the island of Hong Kong — ‘fragrant port,’ named for the spice trade — to the British in perpetuity. (The British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Palmerston, questioned the wisdom of acquiring ‘a barren island with hardly a House upon it’ that would never become a great ‘Mart of Trade.’) It imposed indemnities on the Qing totaling twenty-one million silver dollars. The United States, France, and other nations piled on with their own demands, including ‘extraterritoriality’ exemption from local justice for foreigners who committed crimes in China. Chinese law would not apply within ‘concessions’ those parts of the treaty ports controlled by foreign powers. These agreements were the first of what are called the Unequal Treaties, beginning a century of China’s humiliation at the hands of various imperialist powers. They heralded the beginning of the end, not just of the Qing, but of the dynastic system by which China had been ruled for thousands of years…
Via the invaluable Delancyplace (@delanceyplace): “The Opium Wars.”
* Lord Ellenborough, 1843
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As we contemplate colonialism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1812 that President James Madison signed the declaration of war against Great Britain that formally launched the War of 1812.
Three U.S. incursions into Canada launched in 1812 and 1813 had been handily turned back by the British despite the fact that the bulk of British force was tied up in an unpleasantness with the Emperor of France and his troops. But the decline of Napoleon’s strength freed the English to devote more resources to the West… leading to the 1814 burning of the White House, the Capital, and much of the rest of official Washington by British soldiers (retaliating for the U.S. burning of some official buildings in Canada). Still, by the end of 1814 a combination of naval and ground victories by the Americans had driven the British back to Canada, and on December 14, 1814 the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, was signed… sadly for the British, word of the accord did not reach troops on the Gulf Coast in time to head off an attack (on January 8, 1815) on New Orleans– which was turned back by American forces led by Andrew Jackson. Jackson became a national hero, who rode his fame to the (rebuilt) White House; Johnny Horton got a Number One record out of it (Billboard Hot 100, 1959)… and the English had to console themselves with their victory at Waterloo later that year– on this date in 1815…
“My favorite special skill on my resume is ‘excellent monkey noises'”*…
If you walk into any bookstore or library in the world, you’re going to see dozens, possibly even hundreds of books about how to write a good résumé, how to structure it in a way that maximizes what you do best. Many will tell you to keep things under a page if you’re not above a certain age range; others will tell you that there’s nothing worse for making a first impression than a misplaced comma or repeated word.
But one thing that you likely will not find is a book that explains how to make a résumé that dates before 1970 or so. (Probably the first book on the topic with any long-lasting authority is Richard Bolles’ long-running What Color is Your Parachute? series, a self-help book that discourages the use of spray-and-pray résumé tactics.) Most of them will date to 1980 or beyond, in fact.
While both the résumé and the curriculum vitae existed before then and were frequently asked for in want ads as early as the late 1940s in some professional fields, something appears to have changed in their role starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s—around the time when many service-oriented fields first gained prominence—in which the résumé, particularly in North America, turned into a de facto requirement when applying for most new jobs.
Companies started treating humans as resources around this time, and many workers traded in their blue collars for white ones. It was a big shift, and the résumé was in the middle of it.
Why the name change, though? There are a lot of reasons why “résumé” won out over “application letter,” but I think one of the biggest might come from the education field of the era. The U.S. Department of Education’s Education Resources Information Center launched in 1965, and early in its life, relied on the terminology “document resume” to refer to its bibliographic entries, which are similar to résumés for people. This information reached schools through documents produced by the Education Department, and my theory is that the influence of this material on educators might just have touched the business world, too.
The shifting nature of work also made the need for more personalized applications more necessary. A 1962 book, Analyzing the Application for Employment, noted the overly complex nature of fill-in-the-blank application forms, and that they would often take hours for prospective employees to fill out. In the book, author Irwin Smalheiser of Personnel Associates highlights an example of one such person stuck dealing with complex application processes:
One man we know, who perpetually seems to be looking for work, has devised a neat system for coping with the application blanks he encounters. He has taken the time to complete a detailed summary of his work history which he carries in his wallet. When he is asked to fill out the company application form, he simply copies the pertinent dates and names of the companies for which he worked.
In many ways, a résumé solves this problem. While some level of modification comes with the work of sending out a résumé, you often can reuse it again and again without having to repeat your work. Sure, job applications stuck around for lower-end jobs, like fast food, but the résumé stuck around nearly everywhere else.
In a slower world, it was the best tool we had for applying for a new job. The problem is, the world got faster—and the model began to show its flaws…
The résumé, a document that largely gained prominence in the past half-century, was once a key part of getting a job. Soon, it might just disappear entirely. From the always-illuminating Ernie Smith, “Throw It In The Pile.”
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As we boil it down (and spice it up), we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that President Andrew Jackson sent federal troops to intervene in a labor dispute for the first time in U.S. history. Foreshadowing the notorious cases of federal military intervention in labor disputes during America’s Gilded Age, Jackson quashed labor unrest during the construction of the C&O Canal.
Hardcore History…
Your correspondent and his daughter were recently in Our Nation’s Capital, and visited that collection of museums arrayed around The Mall. We were amazed to have the exhibits more or less to ourselves.
So it was a delight to discover the work of artist Jenny Burrows and copywriter Matt Kappler, who created a wonderful set of fake ads for that famous institution. E.g.,
The originals of the ads above and below, and of the rest of the set, featured the name and logo of “America’s Treasure Chest”; but as our friends at Design Milk report, “unfortunately, that major museum was not a fan. Jenny had to change the text at the bottom to read “Museums” and change the logo. You can read all about that here.”
See the rest of the Jenny’s and Matt’s portfolio at “Historically Hardcore.”
As we wish that our tax dollars could stretch to cover a sense of humor, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that Booker T. Washington became the first African-American to be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp. (The first U.S. coin to feature an African-American was the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar, minted from 1946 to 1951; he was also depicted on a [“regular”] U.S. Half Dollar from 1951–1954.)
Homage is where the heart is…
On the tenth anniversary of the release of The Matrix, Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett invested 440 hours in painstakingly recreating 990 frames of the film– the famous “Bullet Time” dodge sequence– in Lego.
See the finished sequence:
And marvel at the extraordinary fidelity of their craft in this side-by-side comparison:
ToTH to Scott Beale and Laughing Squid…
Readers might want to tweet the news that the “Top Words of 2009” (as culled by the Global Language Monitor) are in. The winner? “Twitter— the ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters.” (And then again, readers might want to choose their words carefully…)
As we wander around Plato’s cave, we might take celebratory dip in the pork barrel today in honor of Andrew Jackson, whose election as 7th President of the U.S. (as solemnized by the Electoral College) on this date in 1828 both manifest and accelerated America’s shift toward its democratic (if not Democratic) future.
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