Swamp Notes by Edward Luce: The Gresham's Law of our democracies

The Gresham’s Law of our democracies By Edward Luce October 4, 2019 I recently stumbled across the following quote: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”  It comes, of course, from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism — that grand tome from 1951 that shot to the top of the Amazon best seller list after Trump was elected. It made me think about the age we’re in.  Leave aside the vast differences between then and now. We are not plagued by gulags, or concentration camps, or goose-stepping armies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a better guide to our predicament than George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley’s dystopia kept people quiescent on the drug, Soma. There is no need to burn books if people don’t want to read them.  Yet in some ways, there are timeless parallels between the 20th century’s worst excesses and the foolishness that bewitches the leading Anglo-Saxon democracies today. We are led by demagogues who have surrounded themselves with thuggish loyalists — the stupider, the better. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch this speech by Dominic Raab, foreign secretary of the once sophisticated government of Great Britain. While you’re at it, check out this video blog by the inestimable Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump national security staffer, who remains a close friend of his administration. It contains the kernel of Mr Trump’s crackpot Ukraine-Democratic Party collusion theory. It is worth mentioning that Gorka accompanied Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, on his overnight flight to Rome earlier this week. While I’m on the subject, this is the Swamp Note I wrote a few months back about Pompeo and Mike Pence’s shared belief in the eschatology of the rapture.  As my former boss, Larry Summers, once wrote (in an unpublished paper criticising the concept of omniscient markets): “There are idiots. Look around.” We do not need to look very hard.

Swampians should note that I would never write about the golden age of depravity in a published column. One of the upsides of having an email newsletter is that you can chat breezily. You can fly fanciful kites. Here is what I would probably not put in a printed column.

We are living at a time when shamelessness is rewarded, stupidity celebrated, and corruption treated as a mark of savviness. Most ages do not reward these vices. They only rise to the surface when the trust that glues our political systems together vanishes, as it has in the UK, the US, and in some non-English-speaking democracies like Italy. You can only shame someone if there is a generally accepted definition of behaviour that is shameful. When people lose faith in the integrity of the system, they give up the ability — or the inclination — to distinguish between different scales of corruption. Ask a random person outside of Washington DC whether Hunter Biden is as bad as Donald Trump Jr, or Jared Kushner, and the chances are that the answer will be yes. 

Where have all the good people gone? Gresham’s Law holds that the bad drives out the good. He was talking about debased currency. But it applies equally to the quality of public life. I have no doubt that there are just as many talented people, and individuals of high moral character, in our time as in earlier ones. Our average IQ apparently keeps rising. The intelligent ones obviously have enough sense to avoid politics. Integrity is also a handicap. Little wonder that people with public service values are finding other outlets for their efforts. I’m generalising, of course. But I think I’ve captured something that should be debated more. We live in democracies that actively deter talent. It is a vicious cycle that will be very hard to break.