Mark Rush
7.9K posts
Mark Rush
@Mark_Rush
Prof Of Politics and Law, Dir, Int'l Ed. Washington and Lee U. Hubby of Flor, Dad of William and Alex. Meagh’s in-law. Celia’s grandpa. Bostonian. Red Sox Fan
Who could have expected Mark Carney, a liberal establishment figure if there ever was one, to be the flag-bearer for the end of the US-led order? And from a podium at Davos, of all places? The more you think about it, though, the more it makes sense. Carney is, at heart, a central banker. As such he understands the power of words and beliefs better than anyone: when you strip things down to their core, a world order - like trust in a currency or a financial system - fundamentally relies on the maintenance of belief. Systems of power exist because participants act as if they exist. That's pretty much it: perception is reality. Once participants acknowledge the fiction as Carney just did (he literally started his speech announcing he'd "end the pleasant fiction" of the US-led order), the system itself unravels. This is incidentally a formal concept in game theory: the shift from private knowledge to common knowledge is what triggers cascades. Carney, with his background, ought to have known this was his most potent weapon facing Trump's America: "Trump has the economic and military might. But I have something his power rests upon: I can shatter the collective belief that sustains it." He's even explicit about this being his thinking: his entire speech revolves around Vaclav Havel’s famous shopkeeper analogy and the fact that the power of the Soviet Union rested on "everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true," on "living within a lie." As Carney puts it, "when even one person stops performing, the illusion begins to crack" and the entire "system’s power" starts to crumble. Today, that "one person" was him. Make no mistake, Carney’s speech at Davos may prove to be one of THE most important speeches made by any global leader over the past 30 years. This is genuinely epochal stuff. More than anything, what it means is that, to the extent it even existed at all, the West irremediably lost the Second Cold War: a Cold War requires two competing systems. Carney just announced that one of them simply no longer exists. This is the topic of my latest article: an in-depth analysis of Carney's speech and its immensely consequential implications for what comes next. Enjoy the read here: open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…
New paper with @curtisabradley: "General Law Revivalism and the Problem of 1938." Short version: Erie is incompatible with and precludes many versions of originalism. (Comments welcome.) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
