Month: May 2016

Chris Cillizza has a lot of difficulty understanding why Bernie Sanders didn’t want to talk about the damn emails. This explains a lot, actually.

Mitch McConnell is trying to reassure concerned conservatives that their presidential nominee won’t be an apostate.

And even as the presidential nominee, Trump won’t redefine the Republican Party, McConnell says. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump predicted he would transform the GOP into a “worker’s party” over the next five to 10 years.

“My view is that Trump will not change the Republican Party,” McConnell says, describing it as “America’s right-of-center party.” “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican Party.”

The question that people should ask next is, “then why should we vote for him?”

The Republican Party’s unfavorable numbers are trending sharply up and are near historic highs. In some recent polls, as many as two-thirds of Americans express their disapproval of the GOP. The Democratic Party’s favorable numbers are trending up. Recent surveys show that the Republican-controlled Congress is staggeringly unpopular, with an aggregate 13%-78% approve/disapprove number. And the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988, save one.

Fully 82% of the people think abortion should be legal, at least under some circumstances. Sixty-four percent of Americans say that they’re concerned about climate change, and about 80% are worried about pollution in our drinking water, lakes, and streams. More people consistently support allowing undocumented workers to stay in the country than favor deporting them, and majorities believe that immigration in general strengthens our country. The people are rather emphatic that gun laws should be stricter. While it’s true that Obamacare is still narrowly unpopular, that’s largely because an equal number of people think it should be expanded to those who think it should be repealed, and the respondents generally agree that the federal government has a responsibility to see that all people have health coverage. There’s even a plurality of people in the country who think the Republicans are wrong to oppose letting transgender people use the public restroom of their choice.

On some of these issues, Trump is even worse than the Republican Party he will soon lead, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Republican Party clearly needs to change in some basic and some extensive ways if it wants to be competitive on the national stage. Trump either offers that possibility or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then there’s really no hope at all for the Republicans in November.

It’s not quite accurate, but close enough, that if I walk out my front door and turn right I’m in Philadelphia’s tony Main Line suburbia and if I turn left I am in Amish country. In truth, I live in a cabin in the woods, and I probably need to drive ten to twelve minutes west to encounter an Amish buggy on the roads.

During growing season, I interact with Amish folks on a weekly basis, usually at local farmers’ markets. But they’re a bit of a curiosity even for those of us who live among them and have the chance to make small-talk with them from time to time.

They certainly don’t use horse-drawn buggies to transport their fresh produce to the markets I frequent. They use vans and small trucks. And they use battery-charged digital scales, just like everyone else. I have an acquaintance who has seen an Amish neighbor using a John Deere tractor at three in the morning, presumably to avoid detection by his disapproving peers. The rules are a little looser than you might expect and their integration into modern society is more complete than you’ve probably been led to believe.

Still, it’s well known around here that the Amish don’t vote. I was under the impression that this was a rule rather than a custom, and I guess that is not the case since MSNBC reports that in 2004 “an estimated 1,300 voted in the Lancaster County, P.A. region (or 13 percent of the eligible Amish voting population).”

Lancaster County is the next county west of me, and the heart of the Amish tourist industry. It’s probably the only place in the state where the Amish have big enough numbers to affect the outcome of an election, although, with only about ten thousand eligible voters, they’d have to vote in a bloc in a very close election to make a decisive difference.

Could Pennsylvania be that close in the presidential election? And would the Amish consider voting as a bloc for someone like Donald Trump?

Friends of Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich must think so.

…Trump supporters with ties to Dr. Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich have founded Amish PAC, which aims to launch the most ambitious get-out-the-vote efforts among the devout religious sect to date. They will almost certainly face an uphill battle, since the Amish don’t watch television or read social media, which could be a net positive or negative for Trump, depending on your point of view. And while voting is not necessarily prohibited by their strict religious beliefs, it’s not exactly encouraged either.

“I’ve got to say, I don’t know that we’re going to change voting habits drastically,” Ben Walters, a fundraiser for the PAC, conceded in an interview with Politico on Friday. “But we can only help them.”

“In Florida in 2000, it came down to a couple polling places,” he added. “What if that happened in Ohio or Pennsylvania? It could.”

I’m less interested in whether it’s even possible to convince the Amish to vote than in the possibility that they would come out of the political wilderness to vote as a bloc for a man like Donald Trump.

I simply have no idea how their religious beliefs translate to our right/left political divide, nor what they might make of Trump if they even know who he is.

Obviously, they’re very religious and socially conservative in some respects. They’re small businessmen and women, although ones who are exempt from a lot of regulation. That might sound promising to the folks who will be running Amish PAC.

But consider this:

Two key concepts for understanding Amish practices are their rejection of Hochmut (pride, arrogance, haughtiness) and the high value they place on Demut (humility) and Gelassenheit (calmness, composure, placidity), often translated as “submission” or “letting-be”. Gelassenheit is perhaps better understood as a reluctance to be forward, to be self-promoting, or to assert oneself.

Maybe friends of Hillary should be the ones forming an Amish PAC.

In any case, it sounds like a scam designed to bilk clueless big money donors. Who would ever guess that friends of Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich would come up with such a scheme?

I really don’t understand this piece by Jonathan Bernstein. He appears to be comparing Marco Rubio with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower without being struck by lightning for his impudent effrontery.

I believe the point with Rubio is that if half the things he said about Trump were true when he was saying them (and they were), then his position now is untenable, lacking in any single principle, and totally without defense.

On that Christmas Day Company I, First Platoon, was very hard hit. My good friend Oliver Coghill was on my right and a buddy named Palko was next to him. Both were killed, and I could hear Lieutenant Lawson calling for his mother.

– Excerpt from the written account of the combat experiences of my uncle, Darrell Burdette Searls, former infantry soldier in Company I of the 290th Regiment of the 75th Division, United States Army, 1944-1945

For many Americans, Memorial Day is just another excuse for a three day weekend where people can party with family or friends, grill hamburgers and hot dogs or barbecue, and drink the alcoholic beverage of their choice. But it wasn’t created for that purpose, at least not originally. Memorial Day began as a somber remembrance following the Civil War, and it was started not by any government but by a group of Union Army veterans of that horrendous conflict.

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.

The point of this observance was, in the words of General Logan, to …

[I]nvite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

Today, unfortunately that intial purpose has long been forgotten. It’s become just another opportunity for Americans to take time off, go on vacation and, above all else, shop.

Not that politicians haven’t made gestures to remind us of what they wish to emphasize about the holiday. As the official Memorial Day page for US Department of Veterans Affairs informs us, in 2000 Congress passed a bill signed into law by then President Clinton, The National Moment of Remembrance Act, “[t]o ensure the sacrifices of America ’s fallen heroes are never forgotten.”

The millions of soldiers who were slaughtered and died in those wars, in our prevailing culture of nationalism and uber-patriotism, have been posthumously transformed into glorious heroes. Their deaths are spoken of with almost an god-like reverence, as courageous warriors who sacrificed themselves to preserve our freedoms, thus stripping them of their very humanity.

Lost in all of the empty platitudes in all the public remarks and commemorations by our political leaders is any mention of why the wars that took their lives were fought in the first place.

Even more profoundly, they rarely mention what wars do to people. Any realistic depiction of war’s horrors, and the the damage and harm it causes to individuals, families, communities and entire nations is pushed aside and ignored. Anyone who dares to contradict the prevailing patriotic narrative about America’s wars is shunned, told to shut up, or labeled an American hating traitor.

But what war does to the bodies and minds of our vets, should be at the heart of any remembrance or observance. War is not a glorious adventure in which heroes selflessly sacrifice themselves for our country. For most vets, it’s a terrible nightmarish reality in which, as the saying goes, the living often envy the dead.

I have no personal experience of war, but my oldest uncle, Darrell Searls, now deceased, saw combat in WWII. Specifically, he fought in the “Battle of the Bulge, oft described as the “greatest battle in American military history.” Certainly in terms casualties suffered by American soldiers, and particularly deaths, it ranks right up there with the “greatest” of all American battles.

I knew him as a great storyteller, and his friends and colleagues remember him as a noted raconteur, always ready with a witty joke or amusing anecdote. Yet, during all the time I knew him, the one life experience he did not discuss was the story of his service in WWII. Only late in his life was my aunt, a former editor, able to convince him to write about his time as a combat soldier. His wartime memoir of that time in his life tells a true story of what it is like to be one of the men and women our leaders send off to fight in our wars.

His Army division, the 75th, was the least experienced and youngest unit in the US Army in 1944. It was nicknamed the Diaper Division because of its youth. Many of its soldiers were literally 17 and 18 year-old kids straight off the farms of the Midwest. They arrived in LaHavre, France on December 13, 1944, three days before the German Army launched its last great offensive of the war against American forces in the Ardennes Forest. The American commanders were caught completely off guard. It was arguably the worst intelligence failure of the war, as undermanned American units guarding that part of the Allied line were quickly overrun by a concentrated force of Panzer divisions.

While my uncle and his platoon camped in misery in the rain and mud at an assembly are in northwest France, the German Army’s advance continued unabated, helped in large part by bad weather that kept American warplanes grounded. Out of desperation the 75th Division was committed to the Battle of the Bulge to support the flank of the 23rd Armored Division on December 20th.

Almost all of the soldiers in the 75th Division had no combat experience, including many of their officers. The parts of it I’ve chosen to include here cover the 47 days thereafter until he was removed from combat duty. I’ve italicized the official US army archived morning reports for his platoon whenever he cites them. His first day of actual combat came on Christmas day, 1944. What follows are brief excerpts directly taken from his memoir:

December 25:

Finally on Christmas Day, as we approached the little crossroads of Werpin, we made contact. […] As we got up onto the road, we came under German machine gun fire … Once across the road, we were out of the field of fire and could proceed up the wooded hill that was our objective. Three tanks on the road gave us covering fire, but their shells bursting in the trees on the hill sounded like firecrackers and were not very reassuring. For concealment, we went through a barn and out a back door, where the battalion commander patted each man on the back as we went through. Three days later, he was relieved and hospitalized with combat fatigue. The stress of sending men to their deaths was too much for him. […]

We could hear bullets snapping around us, but other than the two prisoners, I didn’t see any Germans until we crested the hill and I saw a group running away in the distance. The range was fairly long; but firing several rounds at the departing runners, I could see my tracer bullets flying among them. They all went down, either because I hit them or for cover. I don’t know which, and I don’t want to know.

On that Christmas Day Company I, First Platoon, was very hard hit. My good friend Oliver Coghill was on my right and a buddy named Palko was next to him. Both were killed, and I could hear Lieutenant Lawson calling for his mother. Sergeant Bay was also killed, but not before he apparently wiped out a major position of a German machine gun unit that was probably responsible for our casualties.

My impression was that casualties were much worse than the report indicated. It appeared to me that only about a dozen of us were left, and I was the ranking soldier as a Pfc. I gathered up the survivors, and we continued along the ridge; but the Germans had left. We came upon one German body; and I ordered a young private to “stick it” with his bayonet, an action we had been trained to do to be sure that the person was dead. The boy was reluctant to do so but followed my order, and the resulting crunch suggested that the man had been dead for some time.

December 26-31:

The next morning a captain found us and directed us to go back down the hill and to connect up with our outfit. He warned us that we would see a lot of dead guys on the way. He was right. L Company had been making a frontal assault across an open field at the base of the hill we were to take and had suffered terrible casualties.

Moving through their positions was an almost otherworldly experience, like visiting a wax museum and viewing subjects frozen in time. One particular tableau is with me to this day. The morning was bright and sunny, with a slight breeze. As we filed past one group of bodies, we could see that one GI with a head injury was lying on his back, propped against a log, and that a medic bending over him had started to bandage the wound when he too was hit. The ends of the bandage were streaming out in the breeze.

During the next few days our company dug in along the ridge line we had secured on the crest of a hill under trees looking out over an open field. […] The Germans attempted one attack but were decimated by a tremendous barrage.

Just before the attack, I was working on improving my foxhole, which at the time was about waist deep. I had placed my cartridge belt, trench knife, and canteen on the rim above and in front of the foxhole. Suddenly a shell landed 50 yards out to my right.
I crouched in my hole as 3 more shells exploded almost simultaneously right above me. I looked up to see that the trees had been blasted away; and where I had been in shade, sunlight now streamed into my hole. The handle of my trench knife had been severed, and my helmet was split from the top to the bottom rim. […]

By the time my uncle was removed from active duty for “combat fatigue” in the first week of February, 1945, all of his “friends and acquaintances” were either dead or had been wounded so severely they had been removed from combat duty. My uncle was fortunate. He survived and was never sent back into combat after receiving his diagnosis (today’s military uses a different name for it: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, but its all the same thing).

Studs Terkel famously titled his book of interviews of WWII veterans “The Good War.” My uncle’s memoir, however, that no war is good, though some may be necessary. The plain fact of the matter is that the only good thing about WWII was when the fighting stopped. As my uncle once said to me in a self-revealing moment of understatement, “War isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” And I left out many of the worst things from his memoir to which he bore witness: shootings of captured German POWs by US troops, accounts of self-inflicted wounds used by members of his company to escape combat, and the constant terror and fear he endured. The brief excerpts above are bad enough.

Today, I honor my uncle’s memory, and his courage in writing honestly about the reality of modern warfare. There was nothing glorious about the war he described. It must have been very painful to dredge up the memories of his many friends and comrades and even enemies whose deaths he witnessed, but I am grateful that he did.

Many people who never witness war up close and personal, including many stay-at-home Generals and Political Leaders, speak with patriotic fervor of the honor and glory and sacrifice of the members of our armed forces, but their words ring hollow to me. All wars, even a war of necessity, constitute the worst activity in which human beings can engage.

Both the leaders of Nazi Germany and Japan started WWII as a war of aggression. Before it ended tens of millions of combatants and civilians died, often in atrocities: the terror bombing of cities in England, Germany and Japan; the genocidal mass murder of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other groups deemed sub-human; and lest we forget the first use of atomic weapons against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Under international law, wars of aggression long ago were outlawed and are considered war crimes. After the end of WWII, leading Nazis and Japanese militarists were rightly indicted and judged guilty for initiating a war of aggression. Defeating those murderous regimes was necessary, but that didn’t make it a “good war.”

Sadly, it is now our government that is engaging in numerous wars of aggression. Yet, none of our current or former political or military leaders have been indicted for starting and continuing these wars of aggression, nor are they ever likely to face an international tribunal to adjudicate their responsibility for those war crimes.

Today, somewhere in the world, US soldiers are participating in armed conflicts, whether as part of a special ops unit, pilots dropping bombs on the innocent and guilty alike, or soldiers who remotely control aerial drones of which President Obama has made such great use since he became Commander-in-Chief of our nation’s armed forces.

My daughter’s boyfriend is a member of the NY National Guard, part of the US Army Reserves. A day doesn’t go by when I do not consider the possibility that he very well may be sent off to fight in some faraway country against people who pose no real danger to the national security of the United States.

On Memorial Day we should remember those who fought and died in our wars, but not for the purpose of glorifying their sacrifice as mythical heroes. Instead, their deaths should be a reminder to us that war is the cause of horrific slaughter. It ruins so many other lives it touches, both among combatants and civilians alike. War destroys everything and everyone it touches.

The observances of Memorial Day should be a lesson to us not to treat war and armed conflict as mere geopolitical games between great powers, but as a real and terrible act that should only be taken as a last resort, and only when the lives of our people and the security of our nation is truly in imminent danger.

That’s not the lesson most politicians, elected officials and all those who profit from our nation’s wars want us to take away when we remember our war dead. But those deaths should remind us that war kills people indiscriminately and without mercy. Those who it kills are lost to their loved ones forever. Their deaths leave a void that can never be filled.

War is the darkest stain in the history of humanity. When you take the time to reflect upon what it means to remember our nations’ war dead this weekend, and also I would add, to reflect upon all our surviving war veterans, many who live with debilitating mental and physical ailments, reflect on that.

Thank you for reading,

Steven D

By July 17, 2015, the Huffington Post had seen enough of Donald Trump’s campaign. Their editorial director Danny Shea and their Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim published a remarkable announcement that read:

“After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”

In retrospect, it was one of the more interesting and hard to judge journalistic calls of this political season. It’s certainly easy to mock their lack of prescience, since the “sideshow” is now the presumptive Republican Party nominee and he’s polling competitively in the popular vote. They clearly did not sense that our present reality was even a remote possibility, and I called them out for it at the time:

I guess the Huffington Post can’t quite believe that America is real.

Sure, I can understand the sentiment and the rationale. It’s wrong, though. Donald Trump is currently polling at or near the very top of the seventy billion Republican candidates who are running for the presidency. The media have no right to just assume this is all a big joke that doesn’t need to be taken at all seriously.

It should be taken as seriously as a heart attack. And not because I am projecting that Trump will be the eventual GOP nominee. I can guess at that, and of course I have some serious doubts about his staying power, but this is a serious matter in any case. Why is Trump doing so well, and what does that say about the right-wing of our country in this moment of time?

That’s the biggest political story in the campaign right now and it deserves to be front and center, not carried in the entertainment section.

For me, nothing has changed. I still understand the sentiment and the rationale for Huffington Post’s decision to treat Trump’s campaign as beneath contempt and unworthy of consideration. And I still think that they made the wrong call back in July 2015.

Now I see that they’re running a disclaimer or “Editor’s Note” on their political coverage. So, if you look at Sam Stein’s latest piece on Trump, you’ll see find this at the end:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence, and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and birther, who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

The Sam Stein piece does appear in the Huffpost Politics section, which is no surprise since the editors long ago had to back down on their editorial stance against treating Trump as a real candidate. But the content of the piece vindicates the moral aspiration of their original stance:

This editorial disclaimer is a lot different than the one they announced last July. It carries no suggestion that Trump’s campaign is a “sideshow” that doesn’t deserve to be covered in their political section. But the moral condemnation and contempt is still there and is now even stronger.

With such a disclaimer, there’s no way to pretend that their coverage of Trump is even-handed. The entire idea that they should aspire to even-handedness is openly and proudly rejected.

And, this is a kind of challenge to other media outlets. It’s saying that Donald Trump’s campaign is so objectionable that it’s morally wrong to be neutral.

It’s laudable, but it should also be controversial. After all, we can all make moral cases against any presidential candidate. For the anti-choicers, the Democrats support of reproductive freedom is morally unacceptable. For many people, the Bush administration’s first term in office, including their reckless decision to invade Iraq with no plan for its governance or reconstruction was criminally irresponsible and immoral. It’s not so easy to decide where to draw the line from a journalistic point of view. Is it like defining pornography as something you know when you see it?

What would happen if every major news outlet, in print and on television, prefaced all their presidential coverage with a reminder that Trump is a racist, misogynistic, religious bigot, and an inciter of violence who routinely dabbles in idiotic conspiracy theories?

Would that be an improvement? Would that necessitate another disclaimer that Hillary Clinton supports abortion rights, voted for a resolution authorizing force in Iraq, and failed to follow protocol with her email while serving as Secretary of State?

I can see how this kind of moral stand could snowball into something ridiculous where media outlets first attempt to list their moral objections to all the news they’re attempting to report and then wind up listing all the moral objections anyone might have to the candidates and parties they’re covering.

There’s something nice about putting your standards and bias right out front where people can see it, but that’s not how straight political coverage is typically done.

The candidacy of Donald Trump is presenting a lot of challenges to our political system. When people look back at this campaign in the future, they’ll probably view the Huffington Post’s moral opposition to Trump with a lot of favor, but whether that’s true of their journalistic judgment and the precedent they set is less certain.

Dani Rodrik is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy and, most recently, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science.

The Politics of Anger

Perhaps the only surprising thing about the populist backlash that has overwhelmed the politics of many advanced democracies is that it has taken so long. Even two decades ago, it was easy to predict that mainstream politicians’ unwillingness to offer remedies for the insecurities and inequalities of our hyper-globalized age would create political space for demagogues with easy solutions. Back then, it was Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan; today it is Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and sundry others.
[…]
In reality, today’s world economy is the product of explicit decisions that governments have made in the past. It was a choice not to stop at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to build the much more ambitious – and intrusive – WTO. Similarly, it will be a choice whether to ratify future mega-trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
[…]
If one lesson of history is the danger of globalization running amok, another is the malleability of capitalism. It was the New Deal, the welfare state, and controlled globalization (under the Bretton Woods regime) that eventually gave market-oriented societies a new lease on life and produced the post-war boom. It was not tinkering and minor modification of existing policies that produced these achievements, but radical institutional engineering.
Moderate politicians, take note.

Either Bob Dole is dumber than a box of sporks or Viagra has some side effects they forgot to list on their commercials.

The relative performance of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland economies since independence provides a stark case study in how political decisions can have a dramatic impact on the relative economic performance and social progress of two neighbouring states. The Republic of Ireland has prospered, whilst Northern Ireland was stagnating before and during the “Troubles”, and has not recovered since.

Now Brexit threatens to put that sharp divergence into even starker contrast, re-igniting the political tensions that led to the Troubles, and putting a United Ireland back on the agenda again. It may even be good news for almost all in the longer term, but at what cost in the short and medium turn? Follow me below the fold for an exploration of the chain of events that Brexit might unleash on the island of Ireland.
100 years ago some southern Irish republicans staged the last in a long line of uprisings against British rule in Ireland. The Easter 1916 rebellion was a military fiasco which divided the country. It resulted in the deaths of some 500 people, mostly civilians not involved in the fighting, and caused a lot of damage, particularly in Dublin, where most of the violence took place.  

As was often the case, the British mishandled the aftermath, and in executing 15 of the rising leaders following secret summary Court Martials without defence counsels, they succeeded in re-uniting southern Ireland behind the physical force tradition in Irish Nationalism.  Further attempts to pacify the Irish through the use of secret police, informers and the infamous Black and Tans failed and, eventually, in 1921, the British sued for peace and handed independence to 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland.

The 6 counties of North east Ireland were retained as part of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland because the majority protestant population there, made up largely of the descendants of 17th. century Scottish planters, felt threatened by the Catholic nationalist majority throughout the island and wanted their own state. In the years which followed they used this state to ruthlessly maintain their dominant economic and political position by denying Catholics equal access to employment, public services and voting rights.

What is less well known is that they also destroyed their own long term economic prospects in the process. Belfast was, in 1916, one of the power houses of the industrial revolution with 80% of industrial production in Ireland located in its environs. It’s population had grown from 7,000 in 1800, to 400,000 in 1900 and it was the largest and most developed city in Ireland. The famous Harland and Wolf shipyards had built the Titanic; the cotton, textile and rope industries flourished until the 1960’s; Shorts were to become a viable aircraft manufacturer and the ill fated De Lorean Sports car manufacturing venture had sought to expand the industrial base. Northern protestants even had the grudging respect of hard line southern republicans as hard working, innovative, and entrepreneurial industrialists.

Southern Ireland in 1916 was, by contrast a relatively poor, agrarian and underdeveloped economy with only Guinness and the Jacobs biscuit factory providing some semblance of advanced industrial production in Dublin. Today, despite an €11 Billion annual subsidy from the British Exchequer, N. Ireland lags far behind the Irish Republic in industrial development, GDP per capita, and living standards. Industrial production in the Republic is now 10 times that in N. Ireland, and exports from the Republic are €89 Billion compared to €6 Billion from N. Ireland.

A nation once again? Don’t write it off | David McWilliams

The total size of the Republic’s economy is now four times of that of the North, even though the labour force is not even two and a half times bigger. In terms of income per head, the Republic is now almost twice as rich per person as the North. The average income per head in the Republic is €39,873, while it languishes at €23,700 up North.  The differing fortunes of North and South can be easily seen in the fact that, having been smaller than Belfast at the time of partition, the population of the greater Dublin area is now almost three times bigger than the greater Belfast metropolitan region.

How and why has this remarkable transformation taken place, and how could Brexit exacerbate it further? Ireland North and south is a classic case study in how political and economic development are inextricably intertwined, and how a failure in one area can have catastrophic effects in the other.

A number of factors have contributed to this enormous economic divergence: Firstly, the Republic of Ireland has embraced globalisation, whereas the industrial base of N. Ireland has been largely destroyed by the Shipbuilding, textiles, and manufacturing industries moving east. Starting with the T K Whitaker inspired opening up of the Irish economy to foreign direct investment in the early 1960’s and carried forward through membership of the EU in 1973, the southern Irish economy has been transformed with virtually every leading US information technology and pharmaceutical multi-national locating it’s European Headquarters and often quite substantial manufacturing facilities there.

The Industrial Development Authority has become one of the most successful FDI attraction agencies in the world. The introduction of relatively free secondary education in the 1960s, very high tertiary education participation rates, a relatively sophisticated industrial dispute resolution and wage bargaining infrastructure, access to the Single European Market, and relatively low Corporate Taxation rates were other factors in this success.

The N. Ireland Economy has, by way of contrast, stagnated, much as have many of the other industrial regions of the English North and Midlands, Wales and parts of Scotland. London centric rule has led to a focus on marketing and financial services and a systematic de-industrialisation of the regions. Even N. Ireland agriculture has suffered relative to the south for lack of Government focus despite EU incentives for agriculture on both parts of the island. The emergence of the Troubles in the 1970’s and 1980’s exacerbated the process of decline, destroying N. Ireland’s tourist industry, and discouraging new FDI. However even the past 25 years of relative peace haven’t led to the expected peace dividend, and the N. Ireland economy remains heavily dependant on central exchequer funded service industries and thus disproportionately exposed to London imposed austerity measures.

When it comes to economic development, there is nothing like having a Sovereign Government fighting your corner, and N. Ireland has suffered badly from the relative lack of interest in it’s affairs in London and in the corporate boardrooms that matter.  Indeed this may have become even more pronounced since the end of the Troubles removed N. Ireland from cabinet agenda in London. Irish Officials at meetings in London on EU or bilateral business have frequently noted how eyes glaze over whenever N. Ireland is mentioned. The Republic of Ireland, as a voting Sovereign member of the EU, receives much more respect by way of contrast.

So how would Brexit impact on N. Ireland in particular? Northern Ireland would lose the benefit of EU Agricultural and regional funds and a re-emergence of border controls could well re-ignite the dynamic of active agitation for a United Ireland sooner rather than later, re-activating all of the atavistic fears of an increasingly isolated Unionist community. This would be further exacerbated if Scotland opted for Independence and continued membership of the EU as most Unionist family and cultural ties are with Scotland rather than England.

Ironically the Democratic Unionist party, the main Unionist party, is campaigning for Brexit, possibly out of an atavistic fear of anything that might distance them from the UK but probably more out of an ideological connection with extreme (British) nationalist conservative thinking. The majority in Northern Ireland, made up of nationalists, socialists, non-aligned and some unionists will however vote for remaining within the EU, by an almost 2:1 margin, and this could form the basis for a broader consensus on policy in the years to come especially if Brexit were to come to be seen as a further disaster for the N. Ireland economy.

Should Scotland leave the UK, and Wales show signs of disaffection, N. Ireland will be the least of England’s concerns within a rump UK. It has long been my fear that one day England will simply lose interest in N. Ireland, cut central exchequer funding dramatically, and simply dump it into a constitutional no-man’s land completely unprepared for any political future, be that a United Ireland, an independent N. Ireland, or some kind of awkward con-federation between the two. The Republic, for its part, would be unprepared to take on a sudden €11 Billion p.a. liability, especially if that were also to mean taking on a very disaffected and possibly quite violent Unionist community from the north.

Some argue that this is an historical demographic inevitability in any case, as the Nationalist community expands much more rapidly than a static unionist population. However to date those trends have, if anything, led to a larger non-aligned or disengaged population, one unlikely to take to the ramparts for either cause. All this could change however if Brexit, followed by a further English disengagement, were to put the current constitutional settlement into disarray.

Some major historical changes can come about with surprising ease and rapidity – as witnessed to by the end of Apartheid and the re-unification of Germany. The differences between most Northern Ireland Unionists and the rest of the Irish population are nowhere near as deep as is commonly supposed. Both play for the same Irish rugby team. Both have increasingly close economic, social and family connections. Intermarriage is common, as is the rise of other ethnic identities unconnected with either. Politics in both jurisdictions is increasingly dominated by more mundane bread and butter issues rather than questions of religious or national identity. The transition could be difficult, the lived reality afterwards surprisingly serene.

But there are still significant ghettoes of working class unionist and nationalist communities who cling onto their rival identities in direct proportion to the degree to which they have been ill-served by either. The EU could yet play a major role in bringing those pockets of deprivation and mutual fear and disdain into closer integration.  Certainly the British government has shown little interest in doing so, and it is difficult for the Irish Government to be seen as a disinterested actor for the common good. Brexit could bring all of these issues to a head much sooner than anyone thinks, whilst most would prefer a slow and much more gradual evolution towards ever greater North south cooperation and integration. Certainly the current status quo is looking gradually more unsustainable the more the economic divergence North and South continues.

The only question is whether a peaceful path can be found to address existing and legitimate fears and grievances. It will require great political skill and leadership, but it is by no means impossible. Either way, the EU could yet play a key role, which is partly why it’s possible disintegration would be such a tragedy for Ireland.

I got an assist today, blew another easy chance to score, and thought I was going to die of heat stroke today out on the soccer field. We put in eighty minutes in the blazing sun without a hint of shade. And to think this was a make-up game for a snow-out.

I think I need a couch so I can recuperate enough to grill something.