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Post-War consumerism and licentious liberalism are senseless. by Desmond Fennell “There were whispered arguments between our parents while we watched TV—arguments about changing the rules, we gathered, that applied to all of us, the dads and moms as well as the kids…” Naomi Wolf in Promiscuities (1997) on San Francisco in 1970. During the last ninety odd years Western civilisation has been coming to an end in three revolutions: the Russian and German revolutions, and the Second American Revolution which is still shaping life in the West today. Let me clarify three key terms. First, a civilisation. A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community’s rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period. The community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense that it finds in its set of rules, its framework for life. Some of the rules are circumstantial and therefore changeable; others are essential, forming the civilisation’s defining core. European or western civilisation. Constructed in Western Europe in the twelfth century AD by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, it later crossed the Atlantic and other seas and lasted into the twentieth century. Its set of essential rules of behaviour made sense to our ancestors for nearly a thousand years. A revolution. It begins with a group of people who adhere to a new ideology which they believe contains the formula for a good and just life. These believers take possession of a nation’s central government and by unconstitutional means increase its power. Using that augmented power, they preach their ideology, establish new rules derived from it, empower those who support these rules, and disempower opponents. This process takes at least twenty years, maybe thirty or more. Until the first half of the twentieth century there existed a tacit agreement of European nations, at home and overseas, that all political and military action must respect—or after a transgression re-assert—the essential rules of European civilisation. This tacit agreement applied also to revolutions: the new rules which a revolution enduringly established must not breach the essential European rules. The Irish Revolution and the Italian Fascist revolution operated within this framework. But three revolutions, in three powerful countries, Russia, Germany and the USA, rejected the rules system of European civilisation. The revolutionaries, finding that European civilisation unjustly limited their power to create the good life they envisaged, made new rules that, while forbidding certain behaviours, justified states and individuals doing things which European civilisation forbade. The Russian revolution maintained its post-European rules system for 70 years. The German Revolution was beginning to establish its rules when it was overthrown. From the 1960s onwards the second American revolution established its post-European rules system in its own country and, by proxy, in Western Europe. That rules system is still in force. The second American Revolution The second American revolution began in 1933 during thee Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President. The American revolutionaries were Left liberals who called themselves simply “liberals”. Their liberalism required a big and powerful State shaping the lives of people for their good. Roosevelt brought them to power as advisors and colleagues because he was convinced that their demand for a “Big State” was the best means of tackling the Depression. His New Deal programme greatly increased the power of the Federal Government. When the Supreme Court pronounced twelve New Deal measures unconstitutional, Roosevelt, in effect, got a new Constitution by appointing left-liberal judges who declared the measures constitutional. In 1940, in disregard of American precedent, Roosevelt was elected President for a third term, and later, while America was at war, he sought and won election for a fourth term. The Big State which the left liberals created reached its apogee with the manufacture of the atomic bomb, its use against two Japanese cities, and the official justification of the resulting massacres. This justification of massacre signalled to the liberals that the State they had worked to create was likely to approve those elements of their programme that rejected other core rules of Western civilisation. The aim of their programme, given the Big State, was to bring about a perfect human condition. For that purpose, first, there must be an end to the tacit recognition of Christianity as America’s ‘national’ religion, and to the consequent role of Christian morality as a determinant of behavioural rules. Second, categories of citizens who were legally or otherwise unequal must be raised or lowered to legal equality, so as to bring about a fraternity of individuals, equal in law and in their treatment by their fellows. Third, all citizens must have access to education and health services and be equipped with buying power. And finally, with due regard to the rights of others, the desires of individuals must be recognised as rights and realised as far as possible. Implicit in that programme were Black civil rights and radical feminism; normalisation of homosexuals and of unmarried mothers and their offspring; political and financial empowerment of young people; maximal facilitation of the physically deficient; invalidation of intrinsic personal authority such as that possessed by clergy, males, parents, teachers and the aged; ample social welfare; unshackling of sex and of pornography; legalisation of abortion; and a blank cheque for science. Implicit, therefore, in their programme was a new collection of rules many of which would replace essential European rules, which were traditional in the USA and which they deemed oppressive or unjust. The culmination of the revolution Their chance to implement their programme fully came in the 1960s and early 70s. when the US Government and manufacturing industry needed to increase consumption, with its dual yield of revenue and profit. The Government, committed to reaching the Moon, was waging the Cold War and the Vietnam war. Manufacturing industry with the help of computers and automation was producing more goods than it could sell. First Government, then also manufacturing industry, perceived in the unfulfilled parts of the liberal agenda the means

Agenda for reform: a rightist programme. The events of recent months have clearly shown that current policies only serve to maintain the status quo. This is the sole and unavoidable conclusion currently being reached by all independent analysts and commentators, whatever their ideology. It is a non-partisan concern that informs the rising tide of discontent within the Fianna Fáil and Green parties, recent changes within Fine Gael, the positions of all other opposition parties, and indeed of the entire electorate, as reflected in the opinion polls. There is no longer any need to outline the facts that frame this reality – they are all around us. The tide of international opinion concerning the prospects for Ireland should the current policies persist has turned against us. The IMF (since April 2010), the EU Commission (since May 2010), markets-makers and participants – all have put out sceptical assessments of official Irish Government projections for the recovery. Irish banks – far from being repaired by Nama – just keep asking for more taxpayers’ bailouts with the frightening regularity of a drug addict returning to a methadone dispensary. It is, therefore, time to challenge the prevailing policy consensus. It is time to put forward proposals for reforms, to debate real alternatives and to provide those political parties and individual politicians willing to champion change with new ideas to energise the electorate. Here is my own set of ideas – the offshoot of the ongoing ‘Manifesto Project’ I have decided to run on my blog. Fine print aside, let me outline the backdrop to the policies – the backdrop of the specific crises we face as a nation. The Irish economy has been hit by a Perfect Storm that combines: a deeply-rooted crisis in the public finances; a structural collapse of the banking sector; an unemployment crisis stemming from the collapse of employment and jobs creation; a competitiveness crisis that is not limited to wages and labour costs, but the cost of living and doing business; the crisis in the quality and efficiency of domestic services – dominated and restricted by the excessive market power of the incumbent State-owned and State-regulated oligopolies. These crises have been exacerbated by Government policies since 2008. These policies have saddled ordinary families and individuals (regardless of whether they work in the public sector or private sector, are employed or unemployed, young or old) with the full cost of bailing out vested interests and élites. This manifested itself in a rising tax burden, falling provision of public services, and lack of reforms in the banking and public sectors. The resulting devastation of private entrepreneurship and businesses, contracting investment and availability of operating capital and a catastrophic lack of confidence in economy are the corollaries. The accompanying spikes in unemployment and businesses failures, and a hike in precautionary savings are additional manifestations of these. The current crisis has clearly shown that the corporatist State – where vested interests, including Political, Business, Social and Environmental sectors collude with the State to set economic and social preferences and priorities – is morally, politically and economically bankrupt. I believe that Irish democracy cannot be surrendered to these vested interests, no matter how broadly-based or high-minded they might be. There are only two possible futures. The first follows the path we are travelling – the path of a generations-long and painfully-deep crisis of stagnation and declining standards of living. The second one is a path of structural reforms aimed at realigning the current political system to serve the interests of the ordinary citizen. This path is also painful and disruptive. To counterbalance an existing system that promotes pressure groups and élites, an agenda for reform must include changes to our systems of politics and governance, to the provision of the public services, to the private markets and, lastly, to our financial system. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the first two objectives. Changes to political and governance systems Transparency, accountability and social partnership The core changes to the political and governance systems must put transparency and accountability to the front. This will require the creation of systems of disclosure and control that are not susceptible to being tampered with by individual office holders. It also requires ending Social Partnership – delegating all authority and responsibility for developing, implementing and monitoring economic and social policies solely to the Legislative and Executive branches of the State. In terms of transparency, the default setting must be public disclosure and unrestricted free access to all data not subject to State-secrecy considerations. Sensitive data should be published – with the exclusion, if necessary, of sensitive information and identifiers until the time when it can be published in full. Accountability requires that performance and productivity metrics should be designed and refined through experience for all branches of the public sector. All earnings in the public sector should be linked to individual productivity. Local authorities Local authorities must be reformed, reducing the overall number of local authorities to, say, seven, covering: West & North West, South, Greater Cork, Greater Dublin, Greater Limerick, Greater Galway and the Border & Midlands. Seanad and Dáil The Seanad should be given the powers to be expected of a real upper chamber and be elected directly by the people of Ireland, with equal representation for each of the seven geographic regions outlined above. The Dáil should be reformed by reducing the number of TDs and to cover both local and national mandates. The former will preserve a number of seats allocated locally, while the latter would allocate some proportion of seats based on national polls. Both chambers along with the Executive should accord no privilege to their members that will put them above the ordinary citizens of the State. This will require the abolition of unvouched expenses, enforcement of the benefit-in-kind principle of taxation and removal of un-provisioned pensions entitlements. On-line purchasing All State purchasing should be effected on-line, made public and transparent, and subject to annual audits by an independent external board.