Further Notes on “Climates”

Prelude to the French Revolution

From “Social Aspects in Interpreting the French Revolution, 1789” by Abha Trivedi, University of Lucknow, available here from the Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians, Volume 15, February 2008. The Emphasis is mine.

After a long period of prosperity, France witnessed serious economic depression in the 1770s and 1780s which caused resentment and bitterness as all classes faced a decline in their status. Production declined, unemployment increased and the recession soon reached to the agricultural sector. Severe drought in 1785 worsened the situation as the yields were short. Furthermore, in 1788 the harvest was ruined by an abnormally wet summer and conditions became even worse in 1789. Alexis de Tocqueville disagreed with Carl Marx’s contention that worsening conditions create a situation favorable to revolution. Tocqueville noted: ‘It is not always by going from bad to worse that a country falls into a revolution and that the French Revolution broke out when conditions were improving.’ He further noted, ‘the state of things destroyed by a revolution is almost always somewhat better than that which immediately precedes it.’ [1] In 1962 J. C. Davies supported Tocqueville as he observed, revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.[2] This seems to be borne out by the general economic trends of the eighteenth century.

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime (Fontana ed., 1966)

[2] J.C. Davies, Toward a theory of Revolution, in J.C. Davies (ed.), When Men Revolt and Why.

Prelude to the Nazi Era in Germany

From “German Economy in the 1920s” by Daniel Castillo (here); Castillo was a junior in college studying business economics at the time of writing. The text has been edited a tiny bit.

At first Germany tried to recover from the war [World War I] by way of social spending. Germany began creating transportation projects and modernized power plants and gas works. These projects were all used to battle the increasing unemployment rate. Social spending was rising at an unbelievable rate. In 1913 the government was spending approximately 20.5 marks per resident; by 1925 spending had risen to almost 65 marks per resident; in 1929 it reached more than 100 marks per resident. The rising amounts of money used for social spending combined with plummeting revenues that caused continuing deficits. Eventually municipal finances collapsed in 1930. Although it seemed as if the collapse was due to debt, in actuality ordinary budgets were the reason for the initial collapse. Municipal officials and politicians were unable to restore order to the budgets. Further adding to Germany's economic problems, the revenue from income tax began to fall. In 1913, more than 53% of all tax revenues came from income, but in 1925, it had dropped to 28%. As the returns from income tax decreased, the government began to depend much more on state trade and property taxes. The government also became highly dependent on the profits made from municipal utilities, such as electric power plants.

Even with all of Germany’s economic shortcomings, it could have still been possible to make reparation payments if foreign countries had not placed protective tariffs on Germany’s goods. With the income Germany could have gained by selling goods in foreign countries, for relatively low prices, reparation payments could have become feasible. The protective tariffs made this idea impossible and further depressed the German economy. Faced with reparation payments they could not afford, Germany began printing exaggerated amounts of money. This threw Germany into a state of super inflation. Inflation reached the point where millions of marks were worthless. Cartoons of the time depicted people with wheelbarrows full of money who could not buy a loaf of bread. “With the approach of world crisis foreign lenders withdrew capital and markets further closed against German imports” (Sweezy 8 [not in source]). The United States was an extremely significant example of this. When the U.S. was hit by the great depression they immediately sought to get the loans, which they had made to Germany, paid back. This, in addition to all of Germany’s other problems, practically caused the German economy to collapse.

To this I would add a number or two. In April of 1919, the exchange rate was 17 marks for the dollar. In April 1923 the rate was 24,000. In December of that same year, the rate was 4,200,000,000,000!

Is it not difficult, in retrospect, to imagine the prevalent climate of opinion in France in the 1770s and 1780s and in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s…

The Anatomy of Climates

I’ve commented once before on climates of opinion here, a subject now under intense examination. An article in the New York Times this morning, for example, wonders “Is the Anger Gone?”—and harks back to the sudden collapse of McCarthyism. The day-old Tunisian upheaval tells me indirectly what kind of climate of opinion must have been seething there. A few days ago I had occasion to review my memories of a visit to East Germany—and the feel of that place came back: so very different from the aggressive progressivism that then ruled the west.

It’s natural to represent such climates as in some ways mysterious. An unsentimental dissection of the thing suggests that climates of opinion simply sum up what most people observe and/or experience and the manner in which observations and experiences either are (or in the case of Tunisia were not) accurately reflected in the public media. The sheer cumulation of events, small and large, and the sheer repetition of the same words everywhere, in the media and then echoed back from the media at the water cooler, produce a climate, a kind of consensus describing not only how things are “in general” but also the trend that “things” are following.

I find it easy to explain the collapse of McCarthyism. In the early 1950s America was on the verge of the most potent economic expansion in its history, about to explode in a veritable storm of physical inventiveness that would culminate in the electronic age of the 1990s. Communism was not a viscerally felt threat on Main Street. The trauma of World War II was receding, not increasing. McCarthy’s crusade was, well McCarthy’s—supported by relatively small interest groups whose reach into the general public was not extensive. The times were relatively good, hence the poison of projected hate did not reach many. The public was immune.

The current climate, let’s call it the Climate of Confrontation, has much more to do with deep, pervasive economic phenomena (to steal a Marxist explanation) than anything else. The great success of that half-century—from McCarthyism to the dot.com bust—could not be perpetually maintained, not when the god of that era, Technology, was undermining jobs, globalism was shifting occupations overseas, and excess wealth sought innovative ways of taking the risk out of monstrous gambles—with hedge funds and the like. The terrorist attack in 2001 was, for the governing elite, a god-send, you might say. It introduced a wonderful distraction to a very major looming problem—namely the need to create a new economy for the U.S. population not dependent on constant, aggressive growth that, in its achievement, simply erodes the jobs of those who are supposed to maintain it. We’ve embraced the war on terror as a new mission—now that the god of Progress was trampling out the vintage of its living worshippers. The period since 9/11 has been a vast, monstrous over-reaction, and in fighting multiple wars and quasi-wars (Yemen, etc.), we’ve failed to transform the economy to support those conflicts but, instead, have been urged to continue valiantly consuming.

This sort of incoherence was absolutely bound to produce the climate of confrontation—because these moves are contradictory. World War II at least restored employment. The War on Terror is still eroding it. The world war had a clearly visible vector. The War on Terror appears to have no end. After losing eight million jobs in 2008 and 2009, we’ve managed to recover one million in 2010. Civility—however desirable and laudable—is not a solution to the very major problem of incoherence in our culture. And we will not solve it by media “confrontations” in which, no matter what the issue, two spokespeople must be faced off to argue the matter as heatedly as possible to maintain the ratings of Personalities.

The anger will disappear, I propose, when we start getting word of people in our extended circles getting jobs and rescuing their threatened mortgages—when fire departments start to hire rather than lay off—when taxes start rising—when our infrastructure starts being fixed, and something is done to mute down the obscene violence in our television shows and the computer games our children play.