The Kanzlerin

A truth not widely acknowledged in the era of supposedly hegemonic liberal democracy - which under her aegis came to a dramatic shift - is the observation that the leader of the predominant European economy, the beacon of free institutions, modest government and respect for the rule of law of the continent, did not herself vote in a free election until age 35. Born under the boot of the nascent federal republic and the man inaugurating the Bundeskanzleramt, her Vorbild Konrad Adenauer, the great chancellor himself purged and briefly interned by Nazis for opposition sympathies and a country remade but lacking an army, an armed police service and having only just come out of the last row of hangings by ever-present and supreme occupation authorities.

Ironically it was a religious calling that brought six-month old Angela Kasner east of the border, to be raised, educated and eventually caught in the land of Ulbricht and Honecker, beyond the Iron Curtain. In its starkly socialist and simultaneous victorian society - whose reemergence in the culture of unified Germany has been one of the most tumultuous and duplicitous accomplishment-failures of her political career - she studied Russian, mathematics, physics and at age 32 earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry at the German Academy of Sciences, in a divided Berlin. Angela and husband Ulrich Merkel, from whom she separated under the fairly tolerant laws of the DDR after a five-year childless marriage. The name would stay, and follow her to Bonn.

Spiriting to power in the havoc and hope emerging from the buzzing and breaking that marked the jovial end of the wall that parted her city, Kennedy's city, in two Merkel joined the opposition party Demokratischer Aufbruch before the first and last multi-list elections to the Volkskammer in the spring of 1990, soon emerging as the right hand of Eastern CDU leader Lothar de Maizière, again last and only widely "elected" Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the democratic republic. Rising quickly in a time fit for molding heroes and leaders and names, akin to her later rival Viktor Orban, the chemist-turned-politician joined the list of the CDU and was elected to the national Bundestag, beginning her political journey at the eve of unification, in a city soon fit for the relocation of a united, democratic parliamentary government lost in a cold German spring nearly sixty years before.

The triangle, the gesture inversed. 

What would have become of Kohl without the emergence of this new giant, opposed - now conclusively known - and certainly watched with skepticism from the United Kingdom, France and several of the now liberated capitals of its brethren of emerging Eastern Bloc states we know not, but ultimately meant another eight-year hiatus for the prevailing Union, though forced to contend not only with the social liberal values setting root, but the predictable economic reactions suffered in the newly constituted states. Before very long, Ostalgie would be too apparent in a society not taking enough economic advantage by the new hegemons. Within, the party was ripped apart by factional infighting, corruption scandals of the breed sparing not even German long-term dominant-party technocracy and a long-standing (but ultimately unsustainable) ethos of ascetic, part Lutheran-Kantian, part catholic conservative values, but also the country's role in a clearly existing and deeply hierarchical Atlanticist bond.

Merkel took no clear sides, but worked heavily in favour of long-standing chairman Helmut Kohl through a series of ministries, rising to the post of party secretary upon the great man's downfall in 1998. The neoliberal sceptre of the 1980s had now passed itself, rather than being passed, over to the SPD in a trend making the exile of the power party even more uneasy, if not harming them in the long run. The rejection of Die Union and liberal FDP, its nymphomaniac but recurring partner, in favour of "red-green" majority, it was far more ignominious than before. Whether Germans were really tired of the grey austerity of "Kohlism" (put the definite article of alcohol's native Arabic on that) or disillusioned by unification and the vast gulf between its limitless promise and age-old dream and the reality of formerly enslaved and impoverished (as it was quite commonly referred in CDU propaganda) eastern brethren and apparent realities cannot be established. But it was, in favour both of SPD tutelage, the flamboyant, active, even aggressive personality of Gerhard Schröder and further reforms chipping at the Sozialwirtschaft model (Erhard's grand creation, if not, in that regard, CDU:s) that was the order of the day. The shift, typical of its time but somewhat unfamiliar in the pragmatic, quiet, organised, consensus-dominated facets of the German body politic, came first with ease to Germany but would be followed by a similar and stronger disenchantment, as Schröder failed to live up to the foreign and domestic challenges facing this new and walking giant on the economic and political stage.

If a different style was needed to counter this new time and challenges, embodied by post-division Germany's first and belligerent leader, it would first seem it was coming. With Thatcher, also an "iron" lady on account of her academic credentials, fresh in memory and few other models to equal her, she was labeled an aggressive, if not shrill, somewhat dejected voice of the opposition and the ostensible party of power. A voice, one would later observe, of a woman who had been raised to listen, and to speak carefully. In 2000, she finally succeeded heavily experienced but broadly shunned rival Wolfgang Schäuble as head of the CDU, a position had been as equal to the chancellorship in the federal democratic era as that of the Tory Party had in the United Kingdom. But in a twist to this parallell as well she lost the position of Kanzlerkandidat to CSU:s Edmund Stoiber in 2002, the second such upstart after its legendary long-term leader Franz-Josef Strauß in 1980 (shortly before Kohl's national rise).

And so Stoiber lost, if very barely, situating Merkel untarnished in position for a bid four years later. Or perhaps it would be less. The problems for the "new" SPD were surging. Conflicts with the United States over the Atlanticist bond, with other allies over international entanglements and business relations with the new, "free" Russia, the inability to formulate a coherent foreign policy (a fact ruthlessly undercut by CDU veterans, including Schäuble) and continually rampant unemployment particularly in the recently annexed Eastern provinces, as they had already been labeled, and uncertainty about his financial dealings ultimately cut the loud-spoken Schröder out of favour. In 2005, a snap election ushered in an intense electoral campaign, in which Merkel was continually criticised for failing to hit the "open goal" that was the wreck of the SPD regime as well as open gaffes in national debates, and a cold attitude and uncertainty about her preferred coalition partners and policy proposals. But cold came out in favour and blue conquered over the brand-new red with a few more seats, and intenser-still negotiations for a Großkoalition. It was a hallmark of the more intense Cold War years, but the resulting deal made Merkel the head of the government, SPD tycoon Frank-Walter Steinmeier the minister of foreign affairs and the mild, meek Peer Steinbrück minister of finance, and would put the CDU on top for a succeeding number of administrations that would lay down and destroy her allies and isolate any attempt at parliamentary opposition.

The politics came to concern the European Union, particularly for the first ten years. Continued and increased social spending, devolution of powers and a rebuilt army would be hallmarks of domestic policy, but only overseen to a severe cost of alienation from a continuing changing electorate. But it was European affairs would dominate her term and (carrying on as we speak) more so for perhaps any chancellor since the great Adenauer. The Union had just welcomed new members, including the somewhat speeded inclusion of recently curtained, just democratised states of Eastern Europe suffering from numerous economic and social ills in addition to political and identity issues, afflictions yet affecting some adolescent members such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, all relatively recently delivered from military dictatorship, clerical fascism and economic degradation. The railroading of the Euro, introduced under Schröder and his neighbour Chirac (now Merkel's) as a currency for "Europe" and expected to be established as such, superseding the old system of EMS and open Deutsche Mark dominance. But masks are only a membrane and upon completion - only partially introduced under the still-dominant notion of national sovereignty and a union of peoples - it was hardly pretended the European Central Bank, openly situated in Frankfurt on the Main, would not carry a similar scepter on account of German interests. The Lisbon Treaty, her largest accomplishment on the European area, chipped away at the political notion of confederacy in favour of a developing union but cut short from a proposed "constitution of Europe" after fresh rebellions in Ireland, France and the Netherlands, failed to establish the institutions that - after much struggle and unease, in times of struggle and unease - had established the same for the United States, by the superseding of the Articles of Confederacy by the Constitution (no specifics needed). Furthermore, it came under question - if not until the crash predictably forced the forces of contradiction to inevitable clash for space - to what extent such a European brethren did exist, or did have to be created, by untold means but the proverbial wait and hope.

Nonwithstanding, these were historic accomplishments and on the home scene she was predominant. In 2009, both parties lost ground, but CDU more importantly kept the center seat and could finally negotiate a majority coalition with the surging FDP. This matrimony turned out more sour than before, but more importantly destroyed utterly new-made deputy chancellor and foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's Free Democrats, aiming at a more radical completion of the neoliberal economics of the 1990s and finding little support in the broader German population as well as in Merkel's and Schäuble's cautious leadership. But Merkel herself stood, even stronger. And might have got away with it, or even served as the longest chancellor of Germany ever, if not for the sores of the second Großkoalition and particularly since 2015, which cut down the last political giants of the pre-recession period. The 2013 election had served up all but a stable majority for Die Union on its own terms, a historic achievement, and the SPD under Steinbrück's leadership humiliated for a third time. But the collapse of the FDP, nigh but colossal in both relative and real political terms as they lost all their federal seats, enforced yet another ultimately successful, but uneasy coalition that predictably tore at both parties' credibility. The SPD would repeat the horrors of the 2009 campaign, under the banner of dejected, if initially popularised Brussels veteran and prosthetic Nobel laureate Martin Schulz and came to another, even more catastrophic collapse which - in its throes - came to question its position as the predominant opposition party. Merkel was still queen, but the blow had taken hard, survival was all but glorious, and the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland - only just excluded by a tally close to the FDP's in 2013 under a more moderate, academic-supported slate - and natural queasiness of her old liberal bedmates made the matrimony with red yet again the only option fit, if yet not clearly a beacon of the past.

The Greek debt crisis, the paragon of the post-2009 era of intra-European relations and its cruel exposing the uneasy relationship between international relations, popular wills and economic management, soared her record and solidified her position as ostensible leader of Europe, next to a string of increasignly pathetic and hapless one-term French presidents. With the economy of an already unsteady southern Balkan country, the cradle of demoskratia with all its political and cultural implications bent and shrunk by a quarter under a international whip, while voters at home were increasingly unwilling to pay up increasingly expensive rescure solutions and hapless voter-taxpayers of other crisis-stricken countries (such as the Portuguese) unwilling to experience both. The expansion east, beyond the mere political questions of a resurging, evermore authoritarian Russia - problematic for German politicians who had kindled long-standing financial desires to sustain good relations on this frontier - seemed more a mistake and at best an over-excited grab, with the consequences of the 2013-2014 Ukrainian turmoil putting weight on the eastern frontier, while to the south the doorstep of the union affected by the timely stirrings of the Arab world and its fallout. While not as sternly affected as the leaders of Britain and France, whose victories and overreach made them contend with it militarily, the ever-present questions of humanitarian aid, nationality and integration of cultures - condemned from her own mouth as a failure or at any rate failing in 2010, on the eve of the great wave - would haunt her as the spectre of the financial meltdown had not. This crisis, including the building of quasi-Caliphates and a momentous refugee wave, its timing and weight imposed on the European theatre, proved enough to plow domestic politics into turmoil.

The odds, it must be said given this role model, were stacked against her. The circumstances were, in some ways, grimmer. The times were not fit for building titans. And from this perspective, this truth inherited, she did with grace and would end a respected, hardened champion and guardian of an order already considered ossified. Had she ventured to solve the migration crisis with sterner leadership, and perhaps an articulated vision, she could have made a greater name and a reputation. But the call of Wir schaffen das, contravening the Dublin policy. Meanwhile, the internal contradictions and stirrings were strong and for the last term she was forced to accommodate hardline Bavarian Premier Seehofer as minister of the interior, while steering the course to an unarticulated center. In 2017, she stood more vulnerable than ever, but again managed to to steer clear off the rocks, with the opposition in turmoil. The reds and greens would, however chastised, not challenge the government any more than the CSU would abandon it. Whatever her accomplishments, from which could be brandished a stable enduring Sozialwirtschaft upholding to the rule of law and a civil society, was the enduring throne of government whose occupant would remain with the party she had chosen.

Her policies, while reviled from the broader left and any more idealistic, vitriolic embodiment of the right, not really rekindled on the national scene until on her watch, reinvigorated Christian Democracy in a scene where the ultimately collapse of Prussian society values, and the Communist threat, would seem superfluous. While her rule destroyed any partners as well as rivals which ultimately undid her. And yet, she avoided entanglements to either way, with radical post-DDR socialists and radical-nationalists increasingly popular but late in its coming and marginal in the national theatre. Die Union remains strong, with the Greens whose policies she had co-oped rather than blazed as an ever-likely rival, and under its aegis was the question of who would succeed her, however reviled, as the oarsman (or, as it happened, -woman) of the federal republic, and the prospect of a federal Europe. She smashed the patriarch of European Social Democracy without ever playing the tune or ever an allusion to the , and equalled her mentor in the first momentous challenge of the post-Cold War order. And perhaps it would be one day, after her eventual passing, in the wake of unease and hardened opposition that the brand of Mutti would carry something of the nostalgia of a stable and working past.

Into the Seventh Cow of Plenty

When the tanks came onto the streets, for the last time, in a year-long experiment bringing the political forces of Egypt to a standstill and resurrecting - albeit to to partly joyous or at least gleeful cheers - the order of old overthrown in the Tahrir Square revolution, the greater narrative of Arab and Middle Eastern liberation and Arab modernity (whatever its contents) to a close, months before what may euphemistically be reminisced as the "incident" at Ghouta. This was the moment the Arab Spring jumped, or rebounded into stark winter. In both cases, the pronounced torch of liberty flickered but failed to act, or even to starkly blaze in face of foes, presumed or proclaimed.

But asides the question of Western constitutional democracy, its hypocrisy and potency beyond its borders, the Egyptian force of change - which had, for a time, incorporated elements of the powerful armed forces, of Suleiman and Tantawi - had starkly refuted the grapes of change itself, arrested the order of the new as it had the old, and turned the tide of history. Before long the wheel arguably levelled by the Freedom and Justice administration had been turned to creek and linger over its former pilots and manifold supporters, a cry of triumph and exultation turned to terror. Within two years of sham trials and increasing repression, legal and extrajudicial, the sentence of the rope was imposed on both Muhammeds, Morsi and Badie. The question that might have been asked, by the brave as well as by the pious, was whether this was indeed an arrested revolution, or the a reaction more pure and vitriolic than the one posed by the brotherhood and the political project derailed and dismantled in 2013. The longed-for democratic struggle posed and accomplished not through weeks of turmoil but decades of suffering, want and pain; catalysed or usurped, and now maligned and eroded into the waves of normalcy.

The consequences on what might brashly be referred to as the micro-scale, while previously well known and predictable, are now sordidly known. And where one did once did not have, without limitations the freedom to object, to think and speak as one saw fit (and while the reasonable intents of the regime were far worse) one now has surveillance and the most openly brutal means to silence dissent. The only different feature of the el-Sisi regiment, asides from the absence of the very dislikable figure of Mubarak and the predictable generational shift, is its pocketed image of chaos about to erupt, should this order of old rupture again in favour of the new. For we who have seen its face, and like it not, may foreswear our hopes and aspirations, at least for a while, if not outrightly place them in the hands of this old order.

For new, this order is certainly not. The long history of military intervention, stronger in Egypt and entirely predominant until the outburst of 2011, is looming over its future and its most ambitious project since the Suez canal nationalisation, if not perhaps so secure. And whereas the old order could rely on revolutionary rhetoric, the catalyst of a new, Arab state under Egyptian leadership, as well as legion social benefits and subsidies, the new has capitalised on a regiment of hard stick, soft speech, and a carrot retracted. The fear of the order vanquished is its prime quality, one whose

This at least, el-Sisi knows. The structural change forcing ancient theses and syntheses to transform - under the old African crocodile's older axiom of "adapt or die" - has come to Egypt as well, and may cast the need for thrift, for sacrifice and violence in the face of impending chaos worse than the 2011-13 abnormalities, of fulfilling a promise unkept rather than consummated by the spirit of Tahrir and its bestial issue, as sufficiently needed to warrant its survival, at least among the half of the public predisposed against the alternatives to this modernity. At least for now.

The people's Pharaoh and his servant. What might have come - in democratic terms - from the 2012 upheaval and triumph at the polls by the vessel of the Ikhwan in its homeland, we may not know. But whereas el-Sisi may be denounced as having supported both Scylla and Charybdis for as long as convenient, the crushing of the nascent Islamist state has corroded both the Brotherhood's democratic aspirations and hopes for a Western alliance, previously sustained by the bond and, eventually wavering, support of its army. 

But like many things sweet and sour, this may not be forever. The presumed end of el-Sisi's mandate in 2022, unlikely to be duplicated further but almost certain to be extended through a younger face - if not that of Gamal Mubarak, the primeval fear of the 2011 protests - in an attempt to establish the transition. Beyond the ambitious project of reestablishing a new capital, great in ambition but limited in its capacity of truly relieving homelessness and joblessness (these twin evils of the Arab world, as well as much elsewhere) little has been proposed, less likely to be launched let alone concluded to effect. Unlike its south-eastern neighbour by a few miles, there is not even the shadow of a plausible plan for diversifying economy and society,  even in the eleventh hour.

Unbeknownst, if not unknown, to the protestors rocking streets to the sound of the gavel, demographics may serve the Brotherhood as well in the long term. While counter-terrorism efforts and tacit overtures with Israel, Russia and Syria and the activities of organisations like the Islamic State, now hardly a commune, in the Sinai may have proven effective to mantle the dismemberment of opposition groups, maybe even assuage the immediate despair that a Libyan situation would entail, it will - in the words of Ranier Maria Rilke - not feed the hungry, or clothe the shivering, or repay Egypt's surmounting debt, sure to outlast el-Sisi even if the Brotherhood does not. The continued repression of Islamists, parliamentary and paramilitary, taken to the furthest heights (or depths) in Syria, has not assured their destruction, and its ability to capitalise in the moderate-authoritarian repressive state in Egypt - if history is a guide, quite excellent - provides a legion of opportunity.

This is, however, not the last and worst or tenth of the plagues possibly looming. Like the 2012 parliamentary elections, forces more on the fringe of Salafi preaching (if not outright violent) may grow in strength, and armed resistance may be precipitated if the breakdown is not only overseen by the current order, but reaches it. That Morsi, incompetent to the point of absurdity or self-harm, could not reform the military and bureaucracy enough (or smoothly enough) to wrestle them out of the Nasserist-technocrat stronghold so deeply rooted, or not without indulging their respective defensive habits and tendencies, is not a sign someone else may not succeed - or fail by use of more drastic measures the Islamist-democrat never thought to employ.

What would then better the course? Some reforms, while stark, will be necessary to transform the economy and end the system of subsidy currently needed, while unsustainable in the long term. The capital project will relieve the situation in Cairo, while diverting its economic pool. Five million homes is an ambitious goals, but a necessary expense asides the question of unsustainable debt. Sustainable, however, the ecology of the country is not, and transition to a post-petrol economy and past the likeable gas prices of OPEC and the Arab world would be painful, if easier than for Saudi Arabia. However, corruption remains endemic, and the infrastructure - if not quite so important in a country completely skewed to the Nile delta - is not inviting for foreign spending, prospects that will be rocked by the uncertain future in a negative loop of chaos as the grandmother of chaos. Unlike bin Salman, el-Sisi has no huge pool of trillions, but a population of soon to be 100 million. Corruption is more hard to tackle than homelessness, as it is not a question of want, but rather of dividing the spoils of success, and must be quietly steered alongside but never directly against the wind. And as his reign - supposedly constitutional, with political promises as well as a complete transformation of the economy and labour market - passes into its second term, the hour groweth late.

As in Syria, the minorities particularly attended have been granted different, and particular attention by the regime, in firm and mutual but uneasy matrimony. Should the order of old evaporate in giving birth to the new, it may be responsible for the further ostracism of the Egyptian Christendom, among the oldest. Of the Jewish community, once as strong as that of Baghdad, we know naught apart that their preferred butchers need only wait and see the coffins safely carried.

Information technology, biofuel, solar power, financial services - about to undergo an altercation of its own, which may shrink the opportunities - do not pose a likely lifeboat within grasp of Egypt, for now, the prospect of high-skilled migration limited to its possibly worse-fated brother states, as consequences of the tidal wave which will engulf it as well. Women must need be included in the workforce, and croplands rekindled and made more effective. In the end, the regime must provide multitude jobs or a basic income, somehow financed. Whether this could be accomplished via a national economy of the Nasserist model is a good argument, but given the predeliction of the Brotherhood - in its 2010s incarnation, that is - for internationalism, global economy and cooperation - it may in the end be the closure and call for autarky under a national emergency that will soften the blow. By then, however, it will likely be too late but for a genius.

Above all, this order - even benignly judged - lacks a prime quality needed in every order of the new, which is the ideological tenet. To quote the great Kristian Luuk, recently in referencing Cairo, The Vanquisher: Where are we going? The Pharaoh - once, recall, the term for a reign as well as the well-bearded deity-person to steer it - of President el-Sisi lacks a narrative, other than the negative of the need to suppress the forces invoking Allah (too loudly, or angrily) especially when coupled with calls to reform. This cannot last, and elements of the base of the regime may already be crackling. If not democracy, in leaving the rudder of the ship to the passengers, and the risks it knowingly entails, what? The Fourth Saudi state, if yet unestablished, knows what is wants, and what values it can compromise. Or let us say it has an idea.

For all this it may be inferred that the prime goal of the current order is its own sustaining, and its event horizon a neat five- or ten-year term, and paying less respects to the hard facts of the present than laggardly European governments. But with the dismantling of opposition parties only too successful, it is hard to grasp what opposition will harness the potency, and problems, of the old country. While the new military dictatorship has been established in the permanent sense, and while its ambitions may both incorporate regional stability, peace and even a new settlement in war-torn Libya (contentious and challenging as el-Sisi's proxy and vying client king may appear) may truly rival those of any leader since Nasser, and with the matching personal ambition and dignitas, the prospects are indeed looking as grim, or even as for stubborn Ramesses... not the second, but his counterpart in that old gruesome book of fiction. But with its coffers, human as well as monetary short of easy options, the re-development of constitutional liberties and a national dialogue, and eventually a free, ungoverned National Assembly being the closest, what else is there than being stubborn?

Warren - Vox Populi, Vox Americae Que Futurum

The Democratic senator and well-experienced lawyer from Massachusetts, progressive darling and scion of the Sanders camp, Elizabeth Warren, crowned the end of this two-year hiatus of Trumphood by announcing - well in time - her 2020 candidacy for the party's nomination, the first to sally forth to make democracy safe again for the Democrats, and rekindle the trust of the people on which it supposedly lays and whose allegiance to it has so many times been denounced, declared dead, and risen.

Empress Warren? 

The announcement is interesting, from several angles. Senator Warren, recently re-elected with a remarkable margin, while sharing the quality of (questionable) radical opposition that is womanhood with the 2016 nominee, a woman of merit, vigour, discoursive - verging on demagogic - quality as well as - this time genuine - passion, she is a stalwart progressive of the Northeastern but nonetheless decisively 2010s brand, a "Sandersista" without Sanders, as well as reassuringly (if, at 71 on election day, not remarkably) younger than his own eminence of the green mountain state. While it is true that Massachusetts may serve a poor bulwark of a nation-reaching campaign, with her background evoking a Northeastern liberal elitist bulwark only too fit not only for counter-attack but a better one than could be evoked by the Orange King's own mouth, the unification of the seemingly disparate strengths of the 2016 primary in one candidate is certainly stunning, and more importantly will seem thus to their - hopefully less managed - successors in the spring after next.

The forces rallying behind her will be just as interesting as those sure to be opposed, which may number many more still than the GOP hopefuls to emerge in the shame-lit and chaos-branded twilight days of the bleeding Obama administration. In our first taste, we see - presuming an implausible and democratically deficient smooth sally through to the convention - a confirmation fit for Bannon's prophecy (and praise) with left-wing populism, facing consolidated Trumpist protectionism and populist nationalism on the right, the argument of crony capitalism blazoned by a convinced and tested foe of some of its most ardent scions. With a flair of identitarian appeal to minorities and "(unity in?) diversity", the message is clearly in the Sanders' mold - promising wealth and a less toiling burden for working and middle class Americans, a fairness in the American promise, with more than a dash of national pride, American exceptionalism and optimist flair which, in the words of Khaled Hosseini, "that has made her [America] so great". An America yet to be considered great, one might say, to confound the businessman-prophet of doom.

A mother's glance; modest, calm and serene, back in the days of Woodstock, of Nixon and of a nation - and party - deeply and bitterly divided. Could it be that of a mother of a Mater Patriae, also?

This is, at least in the most extensive and fatigued sense of the term, quite innovative. If one foregoes the associations of the term, Senator Warren has been a maverick as much as a radical, championing regulation and justice with the same flair that she prosecuted some of its most audacious transgressors before (sadly not, one may only sigh, her presumed predecessor as the Democratic nominee). Whereas others have capitalised on typical movements, slogans and hashtags of the time, she remains as fiercely aggressive as independent, as much a preacher of a quasi-Marxist mold as schoolteacher, one who can - like her predecessor, if not adversary - say honestly she did indulge elsewhere before deciding to run for the body, despite auspicious academic achievements.

And there's the Pocahontas factor. Whereas the president was, quite justly, rebuked for rebuke of her playing the card of authentic racial residue, there can hardly be many conviction who took her rhetorical lash for anything more than opportunistic and an attempt to capitalise on that which is inherently against the concept of a state of many nations but no sectarian pride, a play of victimhood by one owning a seat in the Chambre des Pairs. But look again, and you'll notice the ethnic factor as presented in a nearly Marxist mold, subservient to the issue of class politics, of redistributing to (the story ever told) the good feelings and great expectations of the mid-20th century, possibly without treading too heavily on the embers of globalist capitalism and the price of transgressing it. This is good. This is - now I must've broken it - innovative, or would be were it the object and parcel of an administration. It is, in some sense, a reinvention of the Democratic brand for a decidedly post-Clinton age - no matter how many editors will sordidly rekindle their slogans of four years past, and call it backlash, the banker's darling avenged by the watchdog of integrity. And it is a good case for the enlightened patrician tradition of New England liberals, now reinvented and given a populist mold (again, to fit the hopes of Mr. Bannon).

The true Jackson? Andrew, then unspeakably old and disgustingly dangerous, the last born under British rule, a dangerous populist and demagogue, presumed and declared foreboder of the Trump persona. But is his legacy not more truly evoked by the populist brand of the party he helped to constitute? Sanders' and Warren's image is - as of yet - one of constitutionalism and moderation, of upholding liberal democracy rather than unhampered strongmanship. But in kindling a tempest of its own huddled masses, yearning more than being free, and in antagonising rather than cozying up to financial interests, are they not more worthy of the jackass?

Then what of the others? Well, in a crowded field it will be down to digits and unpredictable upsets on who splits which state in which manner (the ostensibly more progressive proportional system nonwithstanding, the 2016 primary left many things to be said regarding the democratic integrity of the process, whereas the "impossible" candidate out of 17 secured a neat 45 % of the vote) but it will be safe to say that Sanders, out for this reason I think more than any other, will affect it severely, should he follow the call of the throng, and stand once more. But the same is true, and thus redeeming, in the camp that - whatever its name - will not be branded progressive. Amongst a growing field of the new and the nuanced if not the best and the the bright, and a rather unsavoury (in this following the ethos of the 2016 race on the other side of the fence) emphasis on "unexperience" and being unscathed and untainted by established political process, on the new and even unelectable as the foremost, she stands out as one of the better fitted in both terms of radical message and a substantial persona of both integrity and independence, of ubiquity over the unctuous. Whereas Senator Gillibrand has a few more years of upkeep in the north wing, and several to that on the southern side, it is clear it will not be a great asset. Her voting record (you guess who) sports few drastic statements, she nevertheless blasts a record of integrity and independence, a turret against corruption, the lobbycracy and strict "unipartisanism". All this is refreshing.

The first of her gender. But she would also be, bar her presumed contender, the oldest to be first elected, and perhaps more amenable to a constituency further beyond the magic bar of 65, whose imbued privilege she would be presumed to defend... and in the end, perhaps, abandon in the name of sustainability.

With all this said Senator Warren, the first to announce - two months before the point Obama did in 2007 - has a substantial potency and a potential to be expected rather than discounted. But can she win on the real Tuesday, presuming the most beneficial competition in the spring? I am rather certain of this possibility, although there are several factors working against her. Whereas the gender issue has been mentioned - and should be held to the question of her even emerging as the nominee without it; ultimately a fair observation, I must say - the far more pressing concern is the unstated, repressed but ultimately odious brand of "Massachusetts liberal". Whereas this is unlikely to serve as a bastion of an ideally revitalised, broad Medicare-for-all, affordable college and housing, pacifict Democratic movement, it will very likely fly in the face of moderate voters. But does this matter, in light of the median voter case being sordidly torpedoed not only by Alan Lichtman but ultimately the electorate (well, where it mattered) two years ago? Yes, and no. Just as foreign borders have become more floating, domestic ones serve less the purpose they did at the time of the founding of the union, the senator herself being - infamously - a child of Okie, to little resentment for the average Massachusetts man. It will ultimately depend on the program, and whether a broad-based movement can be mustered. In this, she will serve a far more central role than any Clinton could, or Tim Kaine or Joe Biden, but stop be short before accepting Warren as better than Sherrod Brown, or - indeed - even Beto. But this brand could also be evoked by Biden, or Harris - or my unsung favourite, the Brown of the west - or anyone else of a record not in line with a brand of working-class welfare-state warfare.

The Foremost of the Five

The New Year's Eve now emerging poses no particular question with regards to the closing of centuries, or even decades, but does remind me of a question posed since several years. Six years past, I put forwards five presidents, including Jefferson, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Coolidge and Kennedy, suggested as the best among the 44 men (now 44 indeed, and all still men) to have occupied the office. I have tried and trussed with regards to the "five greatest" of personalities of the 20th century, speaking solely in terms of affirmed individual influence... good or bad.

The selection has not been an easy one. I had to forgo, most notably given the gender quota (predictable but perhaps not so draconian, in the great century of emancipation) Florence Nightingale and the bulwark of the suffragettes, whose struggle took flight in the late 19th century, harkening back to the Seneca Falls convention in 1848; a different wave, another revolution in another century. Yet, beyond the realm of the strictly political - to which only a minority belongs, and many highly expected have been excluded - there is at least one illustrious whose legacy cannot be but recognised.

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Innovator of innovators, the first marksman of the 20th century of unexpected, pervasive, inexorable targets, and perhaps the greatest in altering its physical shapes and our day-to-day routines. His example have set the model, his tactics were renowned and bold past the line of insanity, and his antics brought controversy and pure disdain well beyond eccentricity. Quite rightly so, if one would only consider his fate in our light, had the great ideological struggles of the interwar period turned out very differently, and not vainly rocked itself against the American exceptionalism (and isolationism) seemingly so unassailable.

In the great struggles of the late century, which would escalate into the next, he was an innovator of roads Rockefeller would not have foreseen, and combined an industrial mass capacity that inspired rather than rivalled with a perchance for the consumer of limited means, a standard set hard to question. More radical, and perhaps harder to replicate, he raised wages by 120 % to $5, or 1/72 of a standard model a day, to exult even greater efficiency and make the Ford Motor Company the premier patron of low-skilled labour, and thus (not nonwithstanding) the prime producer in a rapidly growing field. In 1918, half the cars in the United States were a black model T and Ford himself had become the largest automobile producer, the first to have thought feasible that which Herbert Hoover later denoted as the dream of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage", the chickens flocking to the pots as much as the cars made an everyman's luxury, by the end of the century being hardly even considered a luxury at all. In 1926, the company introduced the five-day, 40-hour workweek, further bolstering output and worker loyalty. In this struggle he did not stand alone, but would be a main architect of the consumer society as well. With the increasing contradictions and struggles which came to a close during Hoover's days, and it became questionable whether the system which made Ford, and Hoover, could sustain itself or their manyfold beneficiaries turned more reluctant. Across the Atlantic this sway would turn into bloody mayhem, stoked by the reading matter Ford had gratuitously produced and distributed to awaken Americans in face of an everlasting, and very omnipresent Jewish menace.

The source of Ford's antisemitism is not very well known, but was almost certainly stoked by the fires which burned bright in the East and across Europe, and the presumption of a Bolshevik-anarchist subversion against Anglo-Saxon creativity, Christian society and American toil and success, as expressed by his own life's achievements. Biographer Robert Lacey claimed that it may have ultimately closed his own life, as he suffered a final and debilitating stroke during a newsreel of Nazi concentration camps. In this flirt or rather obsession, not unrivalled, may qualify as one of the most flagrant, if not functional, cases of a man who was on "the wrong side of history".

How he would have fared in Ferdinand Porsche's or Fritz ter Meer's situation, we may not know. But as Porsche and KdF failed to rival Ford's success, so did managed totalitarian economies fail to replace the king. The capitalist economy, and consumer automobile ownership, endured and eventually reached a further zenith after the war which followed, although bolstered by increased regulatory frameworks and the industrial economy would eventually reach a point of robotisation and relocation that quashed any hopes of a workers' capitalism, killed by the ecstasy of the means which made its sustainment profitable, and thus possible. How much he helped to accomplish its consummation, and the unprecedented wealth eventually seen at the close of the century of the automobile, we know not either. But in any individual case, he would have influenced as much as he was moved. Like Tesla, Edison and scores of inventors and innovators after him, and Thomas Jefferson before him, a celebration to the universal genius that resides in the eccentric.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)

The only one to have caught my eye, so to speak, if from a state of slow and ghostly mouldering thus consigned over a stretch of ninety years, caught on as his empire - the state he built - gradually faced a lingering and ultimately fatal decay of its own.

How could we describe him, apart from (as well as making justice to) Robert Service's statement that indeed "we live in his shadow"? In the lingo of builders; the architect, if it doesn't sound to pessimistic, of the modern bureaucratic-totalitarian state, although its facets may not have been those he had selected at another time. The destruction ball and undertaker of an old and society which, in his analysis, had come to a point of self-breaking, a humanity divided, and yet strained against orthodoxy in his proposition that radical socio-economic change could be orchestrated, ultimately, in a society so backward that his great master had never bothered to renounce it. You make your soup with the ingredients at hand, as a great Swedish cook supposedly (but, as with many cases, probably never) said. His country, his people were Russia, and the first to be rocked by major upheaval in the first existential struggle of this century of revolutionary alterations challenged only by the previous. His life, blossoming in this catalyst of carnage and change, had been prepared for this moment. He acted with novelty decisiveness, intrigue and stubbornness as he returned from exile to encompass the destruction of a dynasty responsible for the death of his older brother Aleksandr Uljanov, the man of Simbirsk, and eventually millions of others - the inexorable march not towards, but already into something different, a baptism of fire and blood that would not only destroy old Russia, but make the new world.

And home he spirited, or was spirited; aimed, inserted and (in Churchill's words) injected into the Russian body politic. Months later, after steering fractional infighting and yet another exile, in the eery dark hours of an early morning in what was October on the pages of the outdated Czarist calendar, the man of history emerged victorious - not a victor, but at head of an unruly movement how united, at least inside the borders within it would finally govern, and ultimately most potent of the forces unleashed. Old Russia had seen a potential which its institutions and traditions were unable to capitalise on, which would eventually - within the lifetime he might have expected - see the rise of the country as the a superpower on a map made bipolar.

But Lenin would see none of it. Suffering from a number of conditions since long, and baptised in power with a submersion into incapacity by an hail of bullets sent by a scion of the deposed Socialist-Revolutionary party - which under Lenin's dominance had bested him in the election to the Constituent Assembly, Russia's first real parliament, almost immediately discarded - his health subsequently deteriorated, his body made useless just as the war had been turned and the world won for the new state. He would spend his last two vile years a figure more impotent than the lesser of the Czars whose position of ritualistic symbolism had earned his hatred. In death, this humiliation would escalate under a successor he had groomed, then struggled, and arguably acted to preempt, one who would go on to massacre most of the men of 1917 - and a few of its illustrious women too - in a sanguinary vortex of personal ambition, imperialist state building that would rival the world and exceed that under which they were born, and entrenching "Marxism-Leninism" as the leading force of the workers Lenin had hoped to unite.

His failure may have proved even more fatal, had he lived to see his further successors and their treatment of his legacy and in the remains smouldering, if yet in greatness, one may only ask if the Germany a century later has not proved in spite of its failed revolution a better case for the workers' state, a state of justice and rid of want, and what could have accomplished had it been rocked into the violent currents of 1917-22. Seldom before, and never after, had someone so readily stood at the gates of history both as a case of greatness accomplished - in pursuit of either terror or the promise of a future without the throes of abjection - and the empty promise of the counter-factual which, in slightly different circumstances, could have been that shadow.

Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997)

Previously well covered in a post regarding the fourty-year anniversary of his rise, the small Chinaman - who could have kissed Kylie Minogue without bending and might have refused out of sheer pragmatism - spoke soft words but changed the third actor of the Cold War period to drastic ends, although not so drastic as it would eventually become. Still, the altered fates for the many he helped conquer and eventually ruled, and for the contingent difference in outcomes had he not risen, he earns a clear spot as the man who changed both his country and the outcome of the century. Arguably, for the better.

Deng Xiaoping was born a Hakka, the endo-Han ethnic group associated with the leadership of the Taiping, the most significant of many movements to rock the corrupt, decaying and eventually dethroned Qing tutelage, whose position on that day may yet have seemed unassailable. After training in France, a return to a country wrecked by long-delayed change and upheaval, of a nation breaking apart and a society deeply at odds with its bimillennial legacy, Deng joined the nascent Communist Party (Gongchandang) in its early infancy. It might not have spelled his path to power. After spending years hiding in the mountains after the collapse of the Jiangxi Soviet, haunted and betrayed even by the socialist state whose main interest had been the devouring of Mongolia and Xinjiang into its own sphere of influence, the great and terrible war engulfing both - and finally uniting the revolutionary parties - would push China into the same mold.

But it was only after its own revolution came into Deng's hands that China could stand up and walk with dignity past its northern neighbour. After destroying the Japanese, Chiang's "disease of the skin", the Reds would escalate the struggle and push Guomindang into the sea and over it, and under the new constitution of 1954 Deng finally rose to the position of finance minister. He would not keep it long, and spent years of increasingly erratic and sanguinary purges - and the great starvation which would double the pain and consumption of the war - he was stripped of all offices, exiled, and all but lost his eldest son, beaten and abused into a less illustrious station. Had it been Deng, or had he suffered the fate of many others - including Mao's dauphin Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi, the nominal supreme official - we might know a very different China.

After the death of the Chairman, the table would creak - and all bets were off, and increased manyfold. But ultimately, the alliance with the man christened as the young and impotent ultimate successor, the Malenkov of the Red Emperor, secured his return to power and rise within the Central Committee, without ever becoming the head even of the party apparatus. His personal dignitas was so looming that he could sway policy decisions and direct them through his (gradually junior) proxies, only remaining the chairman of the military commission, the newly created advisory commission and the Chinese bridge society, from which he maintained this position already conquered with the grace, cooperative instincts and soft eloquence of a player of the game. Antagonising the Vietnamese, reconciling with the Indians and maintaining and strengthening the bond with the United States which drove an ultimately tripolar Cold War to a conclusion, his main object into which he poured his prestige was the reconstitution of the revolution, and of revolutionary China itself under the principles of Deng Xiaoping Theory (邓小平理论), and the more universal and compact notion of "seek truth from facts" (实事求是), often summed up by the maxim that the cat - whatever its colour - must foremost be concerned with catching the mice. Its inherent pragmatism and reduction of dogma was a cold breeze, but if the world had found the new leader a member of a reformist camp, its contents would stun nonetheless.

The result, secured and emerging potent only under the 1990s, was grandiose indeed, and put the country onto a path whereby its internal strength would inevitably accomplish the hopes of Chinese intellectuals for two centuries of stagnation, subjection and starvation - intellectual and political as well as raw, material - under a pennant far wider, and perhaps more promising for democratic aspirations, often mechanistically and dogmatically understood as part of economic liberalisation and decentralisation. But as for the latter, while the eastern twin whose pursuit of the same path under different conditions had just seen and all but endorsed the formation of a real opposition party, Chinese activists raised their voices in defiance not only of Deng, but the Gongchandang predominance and a history of Chinese authoritarian rulers in itself, and in Zhao Ziyang found a living voice within the establishment willing to take their side and argue the case of political reform. Deng, ever the flint-hearted pragmatic molded by the starkest of reality, sent in the tanks and snuffled the rebellion before it started, detaining Zhao for the remaining years of his life, to scant praise and glowing condemnation. But the repression came too soon to seem unprecedented, and hostility could not resume. His last years would be more quiet, but help establish the predominance of his reforms, as well as the inception of a non-autocratic system later to bend. As he died, he left an obvious successor, but within a different system and a different China, most clearly defined by the reduction of North Korea from a client slave state into a peculiar and erratic phenomenon, parted in essence from the moderation of its great and increasingly uncomfortable patron.

His work, rather than his creed, fought for and built new China in all its greatness, its reduction in poverty and its stark repressive horror, but nevertheless inaugurated a new era of optimism over dogmatism, development over worldwide ambitions, accomplishment over brazen unity. As the new century loomed, one may not have proposed which change it would accomplish in the world, rather than the opposite, but like Marx it is a question which looms larger as the years pass by and the influence makes itself further known farther from its shores.

Edward Bernays (1891-1995)

You would be forgiven for not knowing about him. Still, suggest he hasn't had an impact on the life you lead - perhaps so many main facets of it - and you may be mistaken in a manner so as to make him very proud indeed. Bernays was a maker in the shadows, a remaker of countries who never raised a sword, a Kaunitz or Machiavelli or Metternich whose works - and words - were never consigned to and often parted from the strictly political. A nephew of Freud, and arguably the last standing of the "great Austrians" of the 20th century, his talents would transcend the strictly personal and psychological to the great affairs of state, of sociology, mass politics and economics, and - above all - consumer society as a practice and an ethic. The greatest changers of history, it must be said, are those whose paradigm are so hard to grasp, yet seemingly so entrenched. Hegel, Aristotle and Luther are easily forgotten, but the residue of their produce so ever-reaching. From Bernays' theory of mass behaviour, and how it could be manipulated - rather than, as was the case for Marx, merely predicted - would emerge not only a series of propagandistic means of warfare seemingly more fit for the era of nuclear non-warfare and perpetual power balance, the new society of the postwar period, defined by consumerism and propaganda, in its wider, less sneering sense. In this, every society of affluence live within his legacy, and reproduce it whilst knowing. What Freud did for psychiatry, he made for Western capitalism, and in this made it stronger and more pervasive in times of great trials.

The manufacture of consent, in itself a revolutionary concept, would be ironically more potent in the society lauded for its liberty, on which Bernays' family threw itself, and he his career. He assisted Calvin Coolidge in his successful 1924 campaign, which saw Coolidge win an absolute majority despite the re-emergent fracture between progressive and conservative Republicans from 12 years before, and carried the means of hard, scientific-tested campaigning to the foreign policy field until the end of the Cold War and the emergence of American consumer capitalism, at the shelf and ballot alike, as the unquestioned victor, having broken down socialist alternatives in the Soviet Union and Sweden. He made women smoke by making smoking feminist, he made bananas popular amongst a wider selection of consumers to a tally of millions and billions, and complimented the workingman's egg breakfast with a Catholic marriage with bacon, all by nudging at the lowest denominators in preference selection, and in this accomplishing more than had been done by any sinister preacher or microphone-kissing dictator in manufacturing what the totalitarians could not; the desire of the subject, and by so systemic means so as to make it almost scientific, in this preceding the attention economy. As Schopenhauer famously claimed, man "cannot will what he wills", but what was filling this mysterious void, he could say little. Few before Bernays would have tried to answer it. But as the century came to a close, which he would follow into the IT revolution, the Clinton administration until its last breaths, Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman held the greatest credit of shaping the new world marked by Fukuyama as the destiny of mankind - now, as he would have affirm poignantly with scant idealism, like wiping a smudge, humankind.

Among his lesser known, and lucrative works include assisting the establishment of the NAACP, increased awareness of multiple sclerosis, and arguably put his theory in service of democratic institutions and several progressive causes - but facing rigid criticism for undermining its tenets, including by author and critic Marvin Olasky, who suggested Bernays' scientific approach to the inner workings of decision-making made the notion of equal, independent-minded citizens more harm than a growing bastion of freedom, a point echoing in the age of stolen elections, troll armies and desinformation, the balkanisation of the media and the disintegration - and perhaps reemergence - of legal constricts.

What he would have said in the era of Facebook, Snapchat, Cambridge Analytica, Netflix - the latter being founded by his great-nephew - and the emergence of the attention economy and netocracy to displace physical consumption, or rather improve it, we cannot know. But in appealing to the personal and narcissistic in individuals, he managed to govern them all, in a way negating Marx' precepts as the great socio-political revolver of the 20th century.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.


Edward Bernays



Finally, a fifth name, which would have to be offered as a dark horse had I not thought it in the very top tier. Which, of course, it reasonably must be:

Maria Skłodowska (1867-1934)

Hers was the first recognition with no equal of its kind twice granted, both earnestly, and the first issued to a woman scientist in the - dare I say it? - actually accomplished, prestigious categories. From not so illustrious beginnings, Polish Maria Salomea fought, moved, loved, delved deep into the expanding frontiers of natural science, rejected orthodoxies and never stopped the relentless pursuit of enquiry, wherever its truth and its undue harshness would take her. Ultimately, her work very much changed the workings of the 20th century more so than Alfred Nobel's own, or her predecessor Wilhelm Röntgen's, of science and society as well as geopolitics and ideology, and grant an eery truth to the pricemaker's desire for a weapon so destructive it would render war all but impossible. A child of a homeland lost and the first woman accepted as a professor at the Université de Paris, an institution of early beginnings but not as mighty a name as Sorbonne, her research would earn her a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. In an alleged fit of precautionary madness, the initial laureates would have been her husband Pierre, and co-researcher Henri Becquerel, for groundbreaking work on radiation. More memorably, the subject matter would pose an eerily prescient hint on the manner of their deaths. Her doctoral adviser, Gabriel Lippman, would follow her only five years later, for his own research.

For they met in

Einstein once said that of all the celebrities of his time, Marie was the one who fame had not corrupted (ostensibly, though his sentiment may not rule it out, excluding himself). Few of her kind would pay so high a price, and the wrecking fate inflicted on both the Curies, and for which there was not then any effective cure, would double down on the so lately restored Polish commonwealth by a rising threat whose ambitions her field would have to marshal their best to quell.

Two score years of Dèng Cháo

The 18th of December, after two years of cementing his power and fending off the ambitions of the Siren Bang with only the final humiliation and destruction - if, gracefully, not physical - left, the barely five foot one Deng Xiaoping, master of everything but no station within the all-powerful Communist Party of China rose to the podium of the third plenary session of its 11th Central Committee to announce the beginning of the new world. If the proclamation could not have estimated the passing of things within the next half century without edging on insanity, even in the presence of a man so modest in stature and speech, it was controversial in its date and could only have emerged from the most vitriolic, if gently managed and peacefully concluded conflict with the orthodox factions within the party. In the end, the confirmation of Hua Guofeng - forgotten leader-paramount - would have been crucial to the collapse of the Gang of Four and the radical transformation about the begin.

A speech that would change everything. While reform might have been expected after the sanguinary epoch of the chairman - the post his true successor would never hold - the truth to unfold, and its fruits, would have stunned both sympathisers and the translucent antagonism of the gang of four.

For what proposed by Deng - again, only so subtly but yet groundbreaking, as crowned by the most counter-revolutionary proposal the previous year of cats and mice, and that the revolution must, in our reality, be subservient to facts and reality, with a clear priority of building a powerful state adhering to socialism rather than the opposite - was no short of a revolution far more groundbreaking than the 1949 Maoist surge and the expulsion of the Guomindang to Taiwan and a few scattered nearby islands. As Chiang had, after a career of criminality, massacre, corruption, conquest, calamitous defeat, staggering, theatrical rise, humiliating staggered consolidation and downfall, final ignominious defeat, bested Mao in performance and dynamism and the great quest - if yet in the incubator - of reviving a great China so long and ingloriously negated, now was the time to ameliorate the damages continually done for two thirds of a century by domestic forces.

Deng's vision, following a different path but in the steps of the Han Chinese-dominated city state of Singapore and its, to Deng, inspirational Lee, and the (more) authoritarian Republic of Korea of Park Chung-hee as by Chiang's China (abandoned recognition, finally and conveniently, this year by the US State Department) in the end turned out an utter and astounding success. Utter and astounding not because of its relative success comparable to the performance of the "tigers" which took the first leaps fresh out from carnage and colonial status, but because of the completion - or nearly thus - of the task left unmade since the aspirations of Cixi and Sun Yat-sen in the last days of the Qing; indeed, since the very first contacts with the West, which had only made apparent the stagnant state of the giant once unrivalled.

First, agriculture was de-collectivised, foreign investment encouraged and restrictions on business limited. After strong initial success, in the late 1980s, the process was carried on to extents of Milton Friedman's liking, involved lifting financial regulatory frameworks, except in key sectors such as banking and petroleum. The grapes of this reevaluation of doctrine, brave if made by the scions often dear to the chairman shortly before, have changed the landscape of China and just as certainly the world, and it is no conservative estimate to announce that if a similar survey as made in 2012 by the author were penned, the name most certain to be included would be that of Deng Xiaoping.

The real revolution, acknowledged. Since the stagnant decline of the Qing, the Asian counterpart of the Ottoman's sick man of Europe, dreams of a rising China have fallen upon different hopes, from the late Sun to the lengthy Chiang, to the Mao of many actions and initiatives. 

After the implementation of the reforms, swift change followed. In the 1980s, Deng's definite decade, GDP nearly doubled. From the year of the speech until 2013, it would grow with a mean of nearly 10 %, rekindling Napoleon's prophetic words of the rising dragon. In the 1990s, to his continued aspirations but relaxed stewardship, China was able to establish itself as a normal international actor and business partner, and eventually reclaimed Hong Kong and Macau, and in 2001 joined the World Trade Organization. The territorial integrity of Qing, bar Mongolia and pugnacious Taiwan (though mutually recognised as part of China) had been reestablished.

The inspiration for this remaking, nothing short of a revolution within the revolution of 1949, has been speculated widely, but key interest has been invested in the "Hong Kong model" emerging from the 1960s, within the framework of British colonialism but effectively a system of moderate self-government, of Chinese culture juxtaposed with economic freedom and - eventually - progress and civic virtue and peace heralding a welfare comparable to Western countries. But equally impressive, and arguably more influential, would have been the republic of Singapore, in 1965 declared independent in brusque separation from Muslim Malaysia to the tears of its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew, whose juxtaposition of capitalism under state-guided leadership, but also of economic liberalism to developmental authoritarianism, had managed to successfully steer it out of a colonialist mould, and far from direct it to a position independent to its neighbours be the tiger of South East Asia, the envy of a continent as far as material concerns were considered. All this from an idea and a strong hand - and arguably a convenient deep-sea harbour. China sported no such comparative advantage, but a large population and army (armed with nuclear capacity) and auspicious natural resources arming it for an independent course of its choice.

The re-emergence. Once the great economy, rivalled only by its south-west neighbour, now soaring well above it. Will the red line claim the world, as well, in a rise of all of Asia, or eventually be harnessed by it? 

The great political assumption regarding the future of the Rénmín Gònghéguó, and perhaps even its status as such, strengthened with the continued bond with the United States into the end of the Cold War, was the emergence of liberal democracy and institutional reforms to this effect - alternately, inexorably, a downfall akin to that of the more reluctant Eastern Bloc states, which came to an ecstatic climax but not a final showdown with the protests at the Tiananmen Square in 1989. Against certain expectations, this was not due to an innate desire of political liberalism accompanying the emergence of capitalism, nor (as is usual) against stagnant living conditions, but actively encouraged by elements within the ruling Communist Party, most notably by Chairman Hu Yaobang, whose deposition in 1987 had led to discontent regarding the future course. Following his untimely death - also coinciding with the unrest, or often the lack of it, in Eastern Europe - discontent grew into open protest, culminating in the great opposition on the Tiananmen Square still crowned with the portrait of the (former and eternal) chairman, which had displaced the earlier one of Chairman Chiang. In this, Hu's successor Zhao Ziyang took sides with the protesters and ultimately, the protest was subverted by the same means that might have expected, and the political reform process stalled. It would not hinder Deng himself, closer to 90 than 80 before the summer was at an end, from withdrawing gradually from his unnamed seat - rather than resigning it - through the following years.

With this chapter closed, the work to build "socialism with Chinese characteristics", in fact an abandonment of socialist orthodoxy and any semblance of the Marxist-Leninist one-party state as much as democracy, could really begin. It would involve - in short - a number of foundations including a rotating, meritocratic order, with oligarchy maintained, under a single-party developmentalist governance, including social constricts like the one-child family with its demographic consequences, a rigidly managed but not micromanaged capitalist economy and societal ethic both freer and eventually controlled by means unavailable to the previous leadership. Two of these core features have been rescinded lately, but the bedrock remains not only a potent contradiction - more so than its manifold critics - but a formula continuing to ride the dragon out of its long rest. 

With forty years passed since the takeoff of Deng's agenda, and a stark twenty years since his death, his legacy stands as the perhaps most significant of any 20th century leader, and the most significant Chinese since the emperors, perhaps since Qin Shi Huangdi himself. But compared to it, any other geopolitical change bar the collapse of the Soviet Union - partly his achievement - shrinks in comparison.

This storm was bound to come sooner or later.

Deng Xiaoping, 9 June 1989

When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, 

you will see how China will transform itself.

Deng Xiaoping, as quoted by Forbes Magazine, Vol. 176 

A revolutionary and reformer. A work still in progress under a looming tombstone. A nation riveted by change. As change in its own form comes to Hong Kong, one may ask whether political reform was intended as such, or even necessary to the relative political and economic liberalisation occurring as a result of Deng's policies, with some Sinologists (or Zhongnanhai-ologists) pointing out the example of Singapore. Nevertheless, just as the 1978 Party Congress unleashed the floodgates of China's geopolitical prominence, reform made possibly both the 1997 handover and the current Gleichschaltung. One should never lose sight of the fact it could all have been very different. 

The Strange Death of Swedish Liberalism

The downfall, heralded and now allegedly conceived, of the Swedish right wing - or rather, its subversion by first a new right-right or conservative bloc incorporating the damned antithesis of liberal thought within the octocracy, second by a potential, ostensibly everlasting and potent middle ground of Swedish Social Democrats, Green and more centre-leaning "liberal" parties - has been followed by resounding calls that the Swedish political bloc system which for fourteen years kept an alleged state of peace, has finally moved from a state of decay to complete and unquestionable desolation. Left from this, just as roughly summed up, a tripolar field of three, or arguably four, blocs with the inexorable march of the Sweden Democratic beast into the halls of power (stopping short just of the door to the negotiating room, but keeping an ear tight and passing its will through ardent knocks) has stopped in a rather open, if lukewarm and uneasy truce with the uneasily dubbed "conservative" parties. Left now is the verdict - under the same adage of adapt or die proclaimed by the aggressively reluctant P W Botha and now heard by the Moderate and Christian Democratic leaders - to be said by the liberals, or the liberal left, when all that is left are Scylla or Charybdis, or the letting of electoral blood beneath the line of political (if not ought cultural) significance. This is especially ardent for the newly christened Liberal Party which may, at the snap election resting at the whim of its significantly more endowed bedmate or the collapse in coherent discourse, be reduced from opportunistic laughing stock to a banner raised - or should I say erected - proudly in the boglands that is extra-parliamentary politics of Swedish democracy.

There are several reasons for this course of actions. The entrance and subsequent, unhampered rise - predictable as it was - of the Sweden Democrats and the reduction of any plausible government to a minority status dependent upon the goodwill, often amiss, of the opposition(s) in a decaying (and unfortunately never-dying) state of bad theatre, of the kind apocryphally denigrated with the gilded review of "She's in the attic!" in places where actual actors assume the roles. Further, the breakdown of the bloc most likely, if not keen, to reassess this order and ask, why not, to the very open invitations of the third party - here a lever of supreme power rather than a status of insignificance - has not been replaced by the logical, and necessary (presuming a majority-supported government) realignment of the unwilling centre to the centre-left, rather than be joint bedmates with the party branded with full, indeed intensified vigour, as the "far right" even by its expected partners.

Several reasons, in addition to the "bad theatre" narrative and the rise of cosmetic politics - the rise of the optics, the actor, the career - for this failure include the unwillingness to adapt to certain realities, and we see in the end is a division between the politics of change and of careerism, which explain the aforementioned rise as much as anything else. In the deep gorge between the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats, a number of camps have been struck, now come together to agree of their unwillingness to agree even over this simple fact: That politics is now dead, and that the age of theatrics is to remain - even after the de-demonisation of the latter which is as inevitable as that of the former - is not a sweeter dish than the great narrative of a struggle against the supreme bespectacled evil. Isolation is a currency of substantial worth in a , but it is now quickly being depreciated (or rather inflated by the expansion of this stratagem in a transition of sniper to mass shooter) while the value of the Sweden Democratic bloc has and will continue to rise - until it is empowered and tasked with ruling the people it has so dearly pledged itself to serve, and which it most certainly entirely loves or entirely hates. A test for any good man of prowess, deep-rooted knowledge and exercise in self-control.

Most annoyingly, to certain liberals including the aforementioned author is the level of hypocrisy, so exorbitantly exhibited, in the transition through (not from) the previous state of ignorance, denial, through many shades of anger to gradual acceptance and bargain to a point where - if there is not to be an agreement between the long-dreaded Labour Party, the cause of conservative-liberal unity (and subsequent hegemony) in the first place - an agreement can be made over the cordon sanitaire, lest it will be have to be broken in a painful cultural shift. The maintenance of a culture of theatrics in this brave new politics is certainly a fact, whilst predictable, does not deserve the epithet annoying. That the grander shift in the paradigm, if not entirely in the discourse, has succeeded a long period of chicken race against this shift, rather than made possible by the pressing presence of this ahistoric third bloc, has certainly not increased the confidence in its adaption or the attempt to fuse liberal doctrine and pathos with hard authoritarian, if largely impotent countermeasures.

With this adaption appearing more and more a question of another generation, if not part of a global attempt to control the assailable but fundamentally irresistible flow of migrants from an impoverished and increasingly unstable south to a relatively impoverished and increasingly unstable north, soon to be reconfirmed by an ever-unstable European Union; more so, if Britain were to reclaim its place. In reaction to the reaction itself to these challenges, the liberal centre-"far right" (in the old order of things) contenders have posed an extreme lack of enthusiastic vision, bold ideas and - above all - confidence.

The unlikely support group. But possible in a centre-left united in a paradigm of democratic oligarchy, foremost defined in its extreme reactiveness. But, as Napoleon said, the one on the defensive, immersed in conserving the present from within his fortress, is sure to be beaten no matter how comfortable - or necessary - the seat may seem. What victories will they claim? How much will they accomplish? Will the coalition spanning from far right to far left (in the old language) prove a last psalm for the old republic, or the beginning of a Dutch order of colourful blocs of the old Swedish principle, rule by consensus and outside-the-tent approval?

Let us examine, briefly, the history of the two parties jointly composing the new "liberal" bloc, between the traditional left and right, and the fourth pole in a previously sustainable, albeit unstable three poles system that followed almost immediately upon the alignment among two, and the affirmation of party politics in the majority and of a broader spectrum of seven... now eight... unlikely to change drastically in the face of aggrieved voters, a fact reinforced by the fact, not sad in itself but perhaps the saddest of this election, that all (if barely) clung to their seats, while amongst the oft-spoken outsiders none came even close, and the proposed true contender, the Sweden Democrats, once and future king on an apocalyptic mission to salvage Swedish civilisation - symbiotic in this aspect - was reduced to near naught after a bitterly unfought campaign by many unsung heroes under a hydra unfit to either designate a leader or replace them. And, it may be said, a glaring lack of interest, at least among the traditional media networks, which was key in the party's 2014 near-triumph.

The blatant absurdity that one may, from a starting point of great ostracism and scarce resources conquer three in every hundred voters and still want for any representation is a fact crafted for no dignified composure, and its equally unsung proposition that the alternative is fragmentation and chaos has proven itself as absurd as the old, and rather undemocratic maxim that certain numerical standards must be upheld... lest the worst among us will be let into the halls of power. However you may wish to design an electoral system, it cannot be on the basis that a particular actor should be excluded or reduced - fear that actual proportional representation would deign the Sweden Democrats a seat in this assembly. As for now they stand at better seat than vote tally, as is the granted custom. A better remedy, and my alteration - and altercation) of choice, would be to remove this threshold - indeed, of all thresholds - and create a national constituency, above all forcing existing actors to fight on the basis of the best program, rather than being the puny, miserable least offensive of the seven - I mean eight - currently in existence, for all intents and purposes.

The question now is the same as before the election: Which shift is first to occur. Either the full split in the centre-right, as fully fictional as the presumed unity of liberals or liberal thought, with a liberal bloc forming the fourth pole, in a new (and certain uneasy) coalition with, and soon within the broad left, highlighted ironically with their enmity against or the continued fealty of these parties in submission to an equally untried, but more formidable alliance between the "true" liberal opposition this new and impervious hard right. In the case the Liberals alone remaining, seemingly more content with the latter, it will not suffice. The initiative is thus entirely with the Centre Party, which faces the terrifying conundrum of a double lock of two negative votes and two more or less explicit promises, both of which cannot be continued to be honoured, if a government is to be formed. Broken promises are easily forgotten, but not always the men - and women - who disgraced themselves with the conduct. Chairman Lööf, unless a personality change is to occur, is unlikely to come out of this coalition washed free of chicanery, with the stoutness of a stateswoman.

It is, with this said, crucial to analyse the structural rather than ideological tenets within the liberal bloc preventing this realignment from coming into full fruition, rather descending into a deadbeat force certain to lose, and perhaps be erased upon an otherwise inescapable fresh election. As it stands, the left - in this sense including the centre-liberal parties - has been reduced to a state of being entirely reactive, formulating policy directly in opposition, rather than alternative to the Sweden Democrats and an emerging "conservative bloc". The realignment into a permanent centre-liberal "left", facing scant opposition from an aggrieved but reluctantly reluctant Left Party and half-growling conservative parties backing a hard-conservative pitbull, would destroy Swedish liberalism in so far that liberal voters would have to force their own realignment either to this opposition, with its potential of an economically liberal policy but being dead as a liberal bloc, or with the Social Democratic (yes, and -green) government.

If this is the future of Swedish liberalism, then Swedish liberalism is all but dead. Confused and battered and - perhaps the worst thing - unable to face its prospects to govern or perish, it has capitulated its responsibility. Solemn opposition, and the decided call for fresh elections, or perhaps more groundbreaking (be there shortly) reform of the system.

Another possible realignment could occur through the reinstatement, preferably with the Alternative Vote, of the long-abandoned one-member constituency voting system, and the subsequent rise of three electoral cartels; the Social Democrats, the liberal bloc, and a perceived, and then very real conservative bloc, with the Greens hanging onto either the first or the second, the left shattering (yet again) between scattered conscientious insignificance and re-joiners (and entryists), under the Social Democratic banner. In terms of electorate, these could enjoy roughly 30, 20 and 40 % of the vote respectively, suggesting - albeit it could well be wrong and underestimate, say, the rise of a strong left-populist party of 28/54 % vote/seat projection - why this change would likely be a dangerous step - lest the motives of current politicians are to derail the system under which they have prospered. It may be too late for such extreme measures to be effective to the purpose, if not too late to see them enacted.

So aside from this game changer, what reforms can be hoped for? I would, in an attempt at conservatism, propose the one mentioned: The elimination of the 1/25 threshold discussed to the point of nausea. It would almost certainly wreak havoc, but slower deaths upon those of failure who may as well face death in the 2020 election (or sooner than that) and the reinvigoration of an increasingly oligarchic system befitting the center-liberal parties less than others, and the introduction of a new not entirely defined by the great dark Other, born amidst raised arms and hooters of lampposts and those of the mosaic faith. This could, in itself, herald a liberal renewal, but would in itself spell a revitalisation of the democratic system ostensibly so beloved by liberal politicians. As it stands, this proposal is unlikely to be awakened, but may in the case of the declining Liberal Party spell its own - brief - salvation. Thus a lot to be gained, and perhaps a majority to be formed - if not from their new senior parter - leaving asides than the utilitarian argument often heard since the last American election, of making "every vote count". This would make as good an election promise and "single-issue" as any, and for all its dastard self-interest make even this disgruntled writer consider strongly the liberal ballot, now restored in name to its democratic roots, and if not wrinkle my forehead and see it go out finally with a pang of righteousness, truly deserved.

Fatal breakage? Now and then, a picture so apt - however feeble and unmajestic - as to shatter the illusions of a "grander" past, and readmit our understanding of the future. How will this image, heralding a (long-heralded) end to the 14-year matrimony, seem in another 14 years? Who, in terms of their offices, will not be there? Whose expressions will by then have been vindicated?