Piglets will reveal your politics. Christian Adam/ullstein bild/Getty Images
What matters more: acknowledging and honouring the nature of things, or reshaping nature to our own ends? For a sense of your own instincts, I suggest searching for images of crated pigs.
What do you feel, confronted with an image of living animals caged in neat grids on a bare floor, as though in a giant metal spreadsheet? Do you wonder at the efficiency with which these living production units can now be managed, or do you shudder at the claustrophobia, the minutely calculated minimum amount of space allocated per animal to just-about lie down, and the cold indifference this system evinces to the needs and instinctive behaviour of sentient animals trapped in its bars?
In practice, most feel a queasy mix of the two, and prefer to look away. But within the ideological Right, the split is starker. And we may be about to see that split at scale, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr faces his confirmation hearing this week. This longstanding critic of Big Pharma, now Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health, has long viewed food additives as part of a cartel that profits from making Americans sick. But how far can he go in Making America Healthy again, when Big Ag is pulling in the other direction?
Across much of the world, farming is a low-profit sector. Producers often struggle to stay afloat; to do so they need to scale up or become more efficient, which gives them every incentive to adopt every technology that will help them do so — including polluting industrial processes, cost-saving chemical additives, and other efficiency measures.
The foremost casualty of this relentless pressure is what’s farmed: that is, plant life, soil quality, and livestock. No wonder, then, that Trump’s Department of Agriculture pick Brooke Rollins told Congress during her hearing that she will support farmers — including by repealing a measure that allows states to restrict the sale of factory farmed meat.
Is this going to Make America Healthy Again? The side-effects of such methods wouldn’t suggest so: for example, both America and Britain are currently afflicted by large-scale outbreaks of avian influenza, which have long been linked to the cramped and often insanitary conditions of factory farms. Similarly, antibiotic overuse and polluting runoff from intensive livestock compounds create further impediments to improved public health, by incubating superbugs, for example, and fuelling toxic algae blooms.
But the incipient tension between making America healthy, and keeping farmers afloat, signals more than a potential inter-departmental spat within the Trump administration. Sustainable and healthy food has long been associated with progressive politics — at least in the days when the Left was more unambiguously anti-capitalist — but has more recently been adopted on the Right as well. And yet the paradox of MAHA and factory-farming reveals, Trump’s coalition is far from unified on this issue. On the contrary, it’s split between instincts we might characterise as “organic” and “Promethean”: that is, defenders and disruptors of the natural order.
On one side, “organic” conservative advocates for place, belonging, and the natural order, such as the late Roger Scruton, jostle with more esoteric Right-wing advocates for animal welfare, and critics of junk food. In this view animal welfare is, properly understood, a conservative cause — and intensive livestock farming an atrocity. In the “organic” corner, American farmer and author Wendell Berry is beloved of the “post-liberal” faction, for his evocative writing against technological hubris and in favour of small-scale farming, and the embrace of natural limits. In this view, our relation to the natural world may be one of dominion, but this should be linked to“stewardship” — and certainly not merely a matter of tech-enabled exploitation.
The meme version of Wendell Berry percolates through the e-Right ecosystem, too, for example in one proposal for “Ice Cream Nationalism”: all cowboys, buxom milkmaids, and beekeeping monks. Translated out of this whimsical register, the argument is a meme-inflected case for re-enchanting food production as stewardship: an activity not separate from social, moral, and religious praxis, but integrated into them.
This very online radical Right abuts more conventional green conservatives on animal welfare as well. There is some debate as to whether Hitler really was a vegetarian; but the Greek-English Nazi mystic and writer Savitri Devi, perhaps the most influential continuer of Hitler’s postwar far-Right legacy as “esoteric Hitlerism”, was also a vocal animal rights activist. Devi denounced human exceptionalism, and emphasised the continuity of humans with other sentient creatures; her fictionalised autobiography is a truly surreal mix of Hindu-tinged race theory, animal welfare polemic, and loving depictions of favourite cats. Devi’s “esoteric” current on the radical Right flew below the radar for many years, but has resurfaced recently among its more colourful online proponents. The Right-wing poster and InfoWars author “Raw Egg Nationalist” is a vocal critic of chemical additives along RFK lines, for example, and has also denounced factory farming.
In the world of electoral politics, this Right-wing caucus for Making Agriculture Green Again is perhaps best embodied by the Romanian eco-nationalist Călin Georgescu, who advocates a “radical ecologism” critical of pesticide and antibiotic overuse, and argues that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy should be re-ordered to supporting small-scale farming.
But there’s a Promethean counter-argument, also internal to the 21st-century Right, which dismisses such considerations in the name of efficiency and technological innovation. At best, as the “anti-woke” utilitarian Richard Hanania has argued, factory farming is cruel but unavoidable — at least until we can innovate our way to a lab-grown alternative. Others assert that factory farming is good, actually: any reform is politically impossible as it would make food more expensive, and never mind what the animals experience: innovation means human progress and should be embraced, not shunned.
This isn’t just about animals. It’s a whole worldview, as articulated by the ebullient ‘Tech Right’ end of the Trumpist coalition, which is as enthusiastically in favour of Promethean progress as it is indifferent to concerns such as small-scale land stewardship or nostalgic paeans to “rootedness”. Led by figures such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, this group broadly believes, in Andreessen’s own words, that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology”. Thus for this caucus, animal cruelty can be solved by lab-grown meat. Raw Egg Nationalist, meanwhile, is unconvinced.
This organic/Promethean dichotomy runs through the whole of the Western civilisational order dominated by America, at least as Berry sees it — but with the dice always loaded in favour of the metal spreadsheet and the “progress” it encodes. In Unsettling, he identified the conflict between organic and Promethean instincts as one that that has animated the American project since settler days: a fidgety and always-lopsided standoff between the urge to embrace a bounded, organic order, and the urge to keep pushing the frontier.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series provides a classic depiction of this tension: on one hand, the family’s day-to-day subsistence labours, a rough-and-ready home that slowly becomes more comfortable and homely. But on the other, throughout the series, Pa’s restless yearning to move on, to settle once more, to begin the whole process from scratch. And it’s not as though closing the frontier ended this habit of mind. Published four decades after Little House on the Prairie, Berry’s Unsettling homes in on the modern-day version of these competing instincts. As Berry sees it, the energy just moved from the literal to countless figurative frontiers: a dynamic in which those who “settled” found themselves repeatedly “dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado.”
Who is right? The pragmatists and tech-optimists alike will say it doesn’t much matter, as all real-world politics means balancing competing interests and ideologies. This suggests the dice will end up loaded the way they always have been: in favour of El Dorado. It’s surely better politics, from Trump’s perspective, to ensure that pork producers in Iowa don’t go bust, than to save Californian progressives from eating bacon that violates their welfare standards. (Even if some of those prok producers are Chinese-owned and not really “family farms” at all.)
Just as the balance of money and influence lies overall with Right-wing progressives, so in a face-off between the Rightists of Big Ag and those advocating clean food and animal welfare, we can expect the big metal spreadsheet to put up a hell of a fight.
And this will have knock-on effects beyond the Land of the Free. Trump’s recent Davos address made clear that any fiction of impartial international trade has been abandoned, in favour of a mercantilist “America First” trade policy. In due course, then, we can expect this to translate into renewed pressure on the UK and Europe, to open their markets to American produce, and with it America’s lower-welfare farming practices.
Nor should any incipient Right-wing defender of sustainable farming expect much support from the EU and its notorious Big Ag lobbyists. Faced with potential electoral victory by Călin Georgescu in Romania recently, for instance, the apparatchiks of Brussels simply ensured the election was cancelled. I doubt this was because of his views on beekeeping, but it surely indicates that simply being a keen environmentalist is not enough to cancel out otherwise unacceptably Right-wing views.
Britain’s younger rightists, many of whom are entirely unsentimental about Britain’s agrarian heritage, may not particularly care if our outdoor farms are obliterated by the American spreadsheet variety. And Starmer’s inheritance tax raid suggests he isn’t particularly bothered either what happens to British producers. But those on the Right with any residual concern for animal welfare, or scruples about submitting our country wholesale to the resurgent Prometheanism of a Trumpian New Right, may soon find their erstwhile Left-wing hippie opponents suddenly looking more like allies.
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SubscribeA lot of waffle about monetary policy which completely ignores the underlying reasons for Britain’s current malaise: a) over-regulation and over-taxation of the small businesses which employ the vast majority of working Brits, b) the pursuit of ludicrous fantasyland energy policies and c) the constant artificial inflation of house prices which, coupled with massive public sector waste, have created an almost universally parasitic middle class.
The issue is less the Chancellor – Reeves is clearly out of her depth – but the Treasury, which will define policy for taxation, public expenditure and investment, irrespective of which party is in government, and which individual holds the role of Chancellor – and who probably needs to endure powerpoint after interminable Treasury powerpoint from one dry day to another. Most of the Treasury staff are well-meaning of course, but that is part of the problem – the UK is unlikely ever to implement the radical reforms that will bring meaningful change, nor take advantage of the opportunities offered by Brexit.
Most of the Treasury staff are well-meaning of course,
But have any of them ever been anywhere near the coalface? My own experience, gained in dealings with pretty well every branch of the public sector, is that these guys have no real clue how anything actually works.
Let’s have a one off wealth tax. Calculate the percent needed to put things in order. There’s no avoiding a one off tax.
Hold on a second there.
Osborne austerity? Spending grew in real terms in every single one of Osborne’s years! That was NOT austerity.
The austerity that is truly needed is benefits austerity and that is now baked in, whatever you say. The simple and rather bitter situation is that the Welfare State has run out of welfare. You can’t just wish it out of thin air.
There’s nothing our Rach can now do. She’s blown her chances. There’s no way back.
This all goes to show that our political class could not negotiate their way out of a body bag. And they are in charge folks!
She’s a woman and therefore difficult, but not impossible, to get rid of on grounds of gross incompetence. I’m just grateful that she’s white and heterosexual otherwise the economic outlook would be very grim indeed.
Oh come off it Yanis, Osbornes Austerity was a walk in the park. But I do remember your Oxford University lecture when you talked of You and your Prime Minister being summoned to the ECB for you and Country to be be castrated. It really gets my goat when the Left here complain ad infinitum about Austerity. What the Greeks suffered was Austerity regardless of whether of it was their own fault.
Full disclosure: I am biased for Yanis. He is one of my fav in terms of world financial economy!
Not withstanding my bias; however, Britain’s current approach—shuffling money between the Treasury, the Bank of England, and financial institutions—has no long-term future. The illusion that financial markets alone can sustain economic growth is collapsing, and the cracks are showing. As interest rates rise and bond markets tighten, Britain faces a moment of reckoning: either it rebuilds its productive economy, or it resigns itself to perpetual stagnation and decline.
The real debate should not be about austerity vs. spending or Osborne vs. Reeves. It should be about why Britain remains dependent on financial gimmicks rather than real economic strength. Until that conversation happens, all Chancellors—Reeves included—are simply rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
Oh dear! What a mess.
The one very sensible suggestion from this article is about us not overpaying interest to the BoE. Richard Tice has been banging on about this for almost a year. Vote Reform!
“… the mindless fire sale of government bonds”. Announced by the Bank the day before Truss’s mini-Budget. A complete coincidence, of course.
Oh, and by the way, Osborne talked a lot about austerity to reassure the markets but Government spending actually went up in real terms every year. That’s not my definition of austerity.
I see the reply feature is disabled – one comment below references the davos men and their “reset”. Well i am sure they’ll try – but don’t hold your breath. As i have said often 25% of the worlds estimated $400 trillion assets are held in stock markets or other financial vehicles – the rest are other assets, often physical. Exactly how is davos man going to get his paws on these assets. I am sure he could rob Stavros the kebab van man but i doubt Putin, MBS or the leaders of the Sinoloa Cartel are losing sleep over his threats. An example showing the impotence of ideology follows: A young motorcycle enthusiast called Yanis wanted his notoriously extractive and criminalised society to be more equal. He though if he could destroy the economy men of fighting age would revolt and create the justice for all Utopia he set his sights on. Then he was stopped, by the Germans with a little help from an Italian – though the latter didn’t stay the course. 1940s all over again eh?
Well , I have a degree in economics and am a qualified accountant. And I didnt understand that.
Now I know I am thick and slow – but could the author please explain that more clearly.
I have no doubt he is right, any chancellor with an untruthful CV is clearly stupid because they are bound to be found out . So I dont need convincing on that score. It’s the financial mechanics I didnt follow.
And yet Osborne talked ‘up’ austerity to stabilise the financial markets, but actually cut little.
Well Reeves is clearly in trouble when Left Wing leading minds ( sic) begin to openly criticise her works and denigrate her intelligence. Mind you, if she did follow any of this guys pearls of wisdom, she would be even deeper in the doo doo. And she’s already up to her neck n it.
What I don’t understand about the anti-‘austerity’ crew is what the alternative would be. Given the primacy of the bond market (which Reeves is experiencing today), if Osbourne had not cut spending, when Covid came along we would have had far less ability to respond in a super-Keynesian deficit-financed way. At some stage the kindness of strangers wears thin and so even socialists like Reeves will end up (soon, I expect) making cuts, i.e. implementing austerity. As ever with Mr Varoufakis there is some very interesting stuff here – the idea of the Bank of England paying the bankers the going interest rate only for part of their deposits, the rest at zero being one. Was that not in the Reform UK election manifesto? Maybe I dreamed that.
Reeves, Hunt, Hammond, Osbourne.
Reeves is clearly the most dim, but the problem is that they have all towed the Treasury line. They tax big. Spend big. Regulate heavily. They do what Gordon Brown, who heavily politicised the Treasury, put them there to do
“[t]he process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled”
Indeed, but one has to do some work to add value to a product and so create wealth. But these days, in the UK, it is financially viable to do no work at all. And should anybody be so minded as to call themselves an entrepreneur and actually try to do some work, they are ‘repelled’ by over-burdensome regulation and by the prevailing attitude that any return for that work should be redistributed for the ‘social good’.
It’s simpler than that. All they can do in office, happy that the main decisions are made elsewhere, is give away money and persecute indigenous British. They have a particular loathing for the private sector. The favoured areas for Labour vote are public sector, welfare and the religious conservatives. Everything is targeted to growing nothing other than that vote, apart from the pensioners (see above) and retaining power.
For the rest of us it’s a wearing down process. ‘Tis the Fabian way.
Austerity? You’re having a laugh aren’t you? Have you seen the levels of taxation, borrowing and spending we are subjected to? These Marxists are a massive joke.
The usual Varoufakis nonsense kicking off from assumptions that are never justified. In this case the claim that Britain’s “business model” is in some unspecified way “broken”. Not forgetting the obligatory “false memory” (I’ll be generous here) of Thatcher “vandalising heavy industry”.
How about this Yanis: perhaps the UK “business model” isn’t that bad at all, but being implemented poorly, not least by interfering and incompetent governments (not limited to the present one) ?
I suggest also that the UK’s resources – both financial and otherwise – are not at all as “scarce” as he wishes to make out. Just being poorly used and wrongly allocated.
There’s a reason this guy is an ex-finance minister.
The last time Labour hiked a tax, income tax from 40% to 50% it generated little if no extra revenue, and arguably saw a decline in tax revenues. With the apparently unforseen (by Reeves and the Treasury) consequences of this one – all the private companies, GPs, charities etc servicing the public sector either passing on the cost rise or cutting back on staff, plus the fallout in hospitality, retail etc I would not be surprised to find the measure raising only a fraction of the Government’s forecast.
At one time I would have found it surprisng that Labour would put low paid staff in the firing line of their policies, but this seems to fit the pattern, as seen with the winter fuel allowance, of hit the vulnerable first and avoid impacts on affluent Guardian readers.
Instead of reducing the NI threshold, so nearly doubling the NI cost of someone on the minimum wage, they could have put an increased rate of say 25% on wages of over £100,000. However this would disproportionately impact the likes of Goldman Sachs, Deloittes, Google, Microsoft and others who advise the Government so I can see why such a measure was not taken.
Well Yanis
The bankers appear to have sorted out your basket case of a country no thanks to you.
Also there was no austerity under Osbourne he just reigned in the profligacy a bit.
Don’t suppose it ever crossed your mind that you might actually be wrong.
“Having warmed up, she followed with the termination of winter-fuel payments for pensioners”
The Treasury had been urging successive Chancellors to do that for ages. Indeed, it would appear that Rachel Reeves is perfectly aware of her own inadequacies and has followed advice from Treasure Mandarins, the Bank of England and other advisors to the letter. That is why there is so little kickback compared to when Liz Truss tried to cut across Treasury doctrine.
What this worryingly shows is not that we have a sub-par Chancellor, but that those advisors and officials who are supposed to know what they are doing – do not!
Beware of Greeks and all that, but be especially so if they come with a big baggage of closed society negative ideologies Does this guy not realise that winter is only halfway done in UK – unless ofc he has some super pre-cognition power that has been hithertoo absent? Reeves is a clown – just the sort of person who could end up running the financial ministry of a failed state – eg Greece, Italy, and likely UK in short order. I think the gilt traders are playing her but also now its come out she faked her experience/credentials i expect there’s well founded fear of what she may do. The financial systems and the govts of the world are a kind of team.There’s a quite rational effect when a cheater or chancer is found in a team, people tend to turn on them, often insadness but more likely in anger – no-one likes to be conned and that in effect is what starmer has done appointing reeves and she in turn carried on the deceit when she accepted the job.
What I can’t understand is why she – and her successor – could understand anything about life in Britain. They have no experience of anything, just theories.
Wherever one looks we cannot escape the Davos man on his way to 2030 and the Great Reset. Reeves merely a pawn on their chess board.