Democracy in the West is besieged! A horror cabinet of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Norbert Hofer, H.C. Strache, Geert Wilders, Frauke Petry, Kristian Thulesen Dahl seeks to alter the democratic equation and eliminate its humanistic and minority protection components. Nigel Farage succeeded in England, and in retirement is now seeking to export his success to the US by way of Donald Trump, a kindred spirit.

Well-meaning people are disgusted, but mainstream politicians seem at a loss how to counter the endless stream of invective. This is partly because we understand demagoguery as a rhetorical phenomenon only. For fact-free Donald Trump this is also correct, but seeking to counter populism with populism is doomed to failure as demonstrated by Marco Rubio. Don’t play your opponent’s favourite playing field!

The horror cabinet shares Donald Trump’s disdain for the veracity of facts, but the others all use ’facts’ to great effect. Most Volksverführer are armed to the teeth with ’facts’ purportedly supporting their cause – always ready to substantiate their claims. In contrast, mainstream politicians normally appear unprepared or unwilling to engage in a substantive debate on the claims of the demagogue. The rhetorical tool of the mainstream is normally to just paint the demagogue into the extremist corner; a strategy that for centuries has proven unsuccesful. The population might be responsive to abuse from extremists towards the mainstream, because the supporters of the extremes normally are the disenfranchised, but you do not get the votes of the disenfranchised by fat cats heaping abuse in the opposite direction.

It seems to me that the most effective tool to counteract the demagogue is to take his or her arguments seriously, and to put him or her in the normal democratic position of having to defend his or her claims in a substantive fashion. The trick of the demagogue is to use facts destructively: we cannot welcome refugees because the economic burden is too big, and anyway they are disproportionally criminal. Deflating these arguments are sometimes not too hard, there is substantial and convincing economic data showing that immigrants do not withdraw more from state coffers than they pay in, for instance. The crime argument is more difficult, but also this argument should be faced head-on rather than ignored. Sadly, you do not often hear substantive arguments explaining how crime rates relativise if you normalise for gender, age and economic circumstances. And how often do you hear explanations of crime rates of refugees relative to their overall numbers, how often do you hear discusssions of perception of crime and types of crime versus the reality of crime?

Yet, even more important than this, how often are the nay-sayers asked to put forward and defend alternative policies? How often are they moved out of the comfort zone of the destructive ? No is not a policy, as the UK found to its apparent surprise after voting for Brexit. But how was it possible, after years of debate, to find out only after the results were in that there was no plan for life after no – that there was only a plan for getting to no? Why is Frauke Petry not asked more about her plans for dealing with the refugee crisis if an attempt was made to close hermetically all external borders of Europe? Frauke Petry has suggested that authorities should be ready to shoot refugees trying to enter. Do the 21 percent voting for her party in recent elections in Mecklenburg Vorpommern really support shooting refugees, or the sinking or letting sink the boats bringing refugees across the Mediterranian? In the absence of replenishment by refugees, what is Frauke Petry’s plan for solving the demographic collapse threatening Germany because of the German lack of population replacement rates? Will she force Germans to reproductive sex at gunpoint? Where is the substantive debate of values, given that, now as then, the extreme right is presenting itself as the saviour of the vulnerable existing citizens of their countries. Why is nobody explaining that there is no trade-off to be made between the welfare state and welcoming refugees: quite to the contrary, particularly in the long run! In the final analysis Frauke Petry’s no’s would lead to the collapse of the European Union, and we thus end in the cul-de-sac of the Brexit referendum. What is Frauke Petry’s plan for a Europe without solidarity? A welcome to a new edition of the Thirty Years’ War?

Fact is the true playing field of democrats, and it is astounding that this playing field has been ceded to the demagogues. Bill Clinton was superb in marrying charisma and mastery of fact, as can be seen best in his splendid speech at the Democratic Party Convention in 2012. We need more like him, or like Hillary, who masters the facts without, sadly, the charisma. Yet, better this than the other way round. George Washington was by all accounts not a barrel of laughs either!

There are so many emperors without clothes around, and it is high time that we start to dislodge them and their false rhetoric. However, this will only be a success if we start to take their arguments seriously and counter them with facts!

On occasion you hear a person, particularly a young woman, described as possessing unspent beauty. The expression itself is wonderfully evocative, but not unproblematic in terms of meaning.

Beauty is a capital that like all capital has to be managed wisely. But ‘unspent beauty’ tends to refer to youthful beauty, and in truth time is the biggest spender of that beauty, even if some may resort to terrible measures like cosmetic surgery in order to stop the visible signs of time. They try to preserve their beauty in a frozen state, rather than evolve it.

Yet, evolution of beauty is far more interesting than seeking to preserve it in an artificial manner. Some older people have a remarkably youthful beauty and mental agility beneath their wrinkles. Surely, this is a much more attractive kind of beauty than the desperate attempts to halt time by artificial means. But also, of course, some have the beauty of age, and that is no mean thing to possess, despite our obsession with youthful beauty – an obsession that is evolutionarily conditioned, and is mostly about sex. The beauty of the older is less about sex – and so what?

Managing beauty, and its evolution, is worth reflecting on. Early in my career I worked on a specific file with the personal assistant of the boss of the firm. This personal assistant was respected by all, not because she was the personal assistant of the boss, but because she was so self-possessed, so in balance and control, so alert to the world around her, so open-minded, so elegant without being over-elegant. Beautiful, in short, in the way of people who have made the best out of their lives. Working for a conservative boss, she was the epitome of how liberal Danes would like to be. Whether she would have been described as having possessed unspent beauty when she was young I do not know, but she had certainly accumulated a lot during her life.

Hers was one kind of beauty, but beauty is not a concept where one size fits all. You can have impossibly edgy people possessing great beauty, you can have persons with perfect features being not beautiful at all, lifeless. Ironically, you can have indolent beauty, and you can have lively beauty.

The beauty of beauty is thus perhaps that you cannot define what it is. So please, please, do not think that it is bound to a certain age or to certain predefined features. Quasimodo was beautiful as well!

Exceptionalism has been a feature of the self-perception of America from the very start. It traditionally denotes a conviction that American values are supreme and of universal validity. General Lafayette and Alexis de Tocqueville of Democracy in America fame were foreign validators of America’s claim to unique status.

The United States being, in essence, God’s chosen people was understood to come with an obligation to proselyte in favour of American values. American values were of universal validity and should therefore reign universally. The United States should be a force for good in the world. This was the world view of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy: ‘ Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself’. The national interest was to promote American values and it went with that territory that the United States should be altruistic, should favour the common welfare of nations and humankind. As Henry Luce proclaimed in his 1941 essay ‘The American Century’ the United States had to be ‘the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive’. Exceptionalism brought duty to serve others!

Exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword, however. Exceptionalism can transmute into the idea that the rules are there for all the others, but not for the ‘chosen’ nation, an idea lived forcefully by the administration of George W. Bush. And exceptionalism can be understood as everything good accruing to the exceptional nation without regard to the interests of the community of nations; a perspective gaining terrible validity though the efforts of Senator Jesse Helms and the reviewed ‘America First’ doctrine of the 1980ies. This, of course, is altruism turned on its head, yet the rhetoric reverberates strongly to this day with no politician being able to propose any foreign policy measure without explaining the very direct and narrow advantages of the action for the nation. In fact, even acknowledged unexceptional nations have adopted the ‘our nation first’ creed, as so cruelly demonstrated by the response of the European nations to the refugee crisis. The original high ideals of exceptionalism have been turned into a call to egotism and parochialism.

Notwithstanding English exceptionalism and the tragedy of Brexit, nowhere is the danger of present-day exceptionalism clearer than in muddled and befuddled populism of Donald Trump. Trump exceptionalism leads to the stupidest isolationism. The Mexican wall idea, the proposed ban on entry of Muslims, the insistence that allies replace US foreign leadership are all mind-boggling examples of altruistic exceptionalism having been turned into an alter ego of egotism and narrow-mindedness. Every president the United States has had until now would take exception to Trump’s exceptionalism, from Wilson to Reagan over Kennedy and Nixon. Let us hope that an overwhelming majority of voters will join them, and that the United States will appreciate ever more clearly that being a leader requires moral leadership above all. Being exceptionally good is the national interest!

We should not be astonished that England and Wales have decided that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union! In the final analysis Brexit is just a last convulsion of a dying empire. That the United Kingdom joined in the first place is more surprising than the United Kingdom leaving.

Many empires have dissolved with more extended pain than the one inflicted by the end of the British one. It took the Roman Empire (East and West) more than a thousand years of decline to die, much more time than its birth and zenith. Endless wars and much mayhem was the accompaniment, and in Western Europe centuries of the Dark Ages followed the demise of the Western Roman Empire. In comparison, the crumbling of the British Empire started in earnest only after WWII and was substantially completed at the end of the sixties (sans Zimbabwe and Hong Kong). The Partition of India brought hundred of thousands, if not millions, of deaths and decolonisation in general was ugly and violent, so the pain caused by the end of the British Empire should not be underplayed, yet in terms of time the process was compressed. Brexit is the imperial equivalent of the chicken continuing to run even after its head has been chopped off. Joining the EU in 1973 was the attempt to keep the head despite the loss of empire. Brexit is the consequence of a nostalgia that was not possible in the troubled seventies, and that can be argued to have been enabled by the EU’s contribution to the subsequent wealth of the United Kingdom. Dreams are much facilitated by a comfortable pillow of prosperity – a pillow that is now being removed.

Despite consternation in Europe the Brexit provides opportunity for the rest of the European Union to overcome some of the structural impediments experienced in the recent past with the refugee crisis following hard at the heels of the Euro crisis. The remedy is obviously ‘an ever closer union’, and with the United Kingdom leaving a major brake on that ambition has been removed. The euroscepticism of the United Kingdom has made the perfectly solvable refugee crisis so much harder to resolve, and the British euroscepticism has poisoned the well of European solidarity significantly even if the Euro-crisis was not of United Kingdom making. Still, Brexit and the Euro and refugee crises are mere birth pangs of a European empire being crafted at the traditionally measured pace of empire creation. What is unique about the European empire is, however, that it is based on confederation principles rather than domination by one nation. The European Union is above all a peace project!

Although largely unrecognised, the forerunner of the European Union can said to be the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary that came to a terrifying end with WWI. The Habsburg Empire was never about national domination, never about Austria above all. The Habsburg Empire was all about the ambition of the Habsburg family, and nations came and went as part of the multinational and multi-ethnic empire, not without pain but for centuries without endangering the health of the overall family entreprise. The European idea is all about the wellbeing, not of a family, but of a family of peoples. But just as for Habsburg and most other empires, nations may come and go, and that should not endanger the health of the entreprise. Since the inception almost 60 years ago the European Union and its earlier incarnations have been all about new nations coming into the empire, now the first one is leaving. This is painful, but a disaster only for the United Kingdom. More nations will certainly join the European Union, and although not desirable some more may leave. All the normal order of business, and if those leaving are those standing in the way of the ‘ever closer union’, so be it. Better that than EFTAisation!

Many have lamented Brexit because the staunchest voice of liberal economics will fall silent. This is true, but there are other similar voices, currently that of the Netherlands, for instance. Still, not having the United Kingdom as a member is a loss, even if the attendant of the liberal economics perspective has been the classical Anglo-Saxon inequality syndrome that has gained increased prominence on the Continent as well. What the United Kingdom will be missing is the societally inclusive models of the Nordic countries and Germany. With inequality being a significant and well-defined threat to societies the United Kingdom will lose more than the EU also in this sense.

What we should hope for is that the EU will be able to conquer its stifling bureaucracy (memento Habsburg) and will continue to develop strong societal models with social inclusion and dynamism as leading characteristics. For this to succeed we will need strong advocates of competition, transparency and efficiency and in this respect the United Kingdom will be missed. But Brexit is far from fatal for Europe and it opens new avenues for the European project as long as we understand that building empire is never linear, particularly given the scale of the ambition! It is high time for a toast to the European idea, the European reality, and the European promise!!

There is something utterly disturbing about how undemocratic democracy can be when patrimony is concerned.

In the UK the population is asked to decide on the heritage passed down by two preceding generations – a heritage for which they toiled and died. Yet, the past has no voice although the intention of our fathers and our fathers’ fathers was to pass on something very precious not just to the current generation, but to many generations to come. And they wanted to pass on something very precious, not just to England or the UK, but to all of Europe. Yet, we are now in a situation where the legacy of Schuman, Monet and Churchill is put in the hands of one generation of Englishmen, with no voice for future generations and no voice for the rest of Europe (and the voices of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being drowned out).

Little Englanders should see the irony of the Brexit referendum actually being akin to the heir of an ideal part of a great estate being asked whether he wants his share to be paid out, although such a pay-out would erase the rights of all his off-spring, and would jeopardise the viability of the whole estate and the privileges of all the other family members depending on the estate. Not a very Downton thing to do!

The EU has been a remarkable succesful peace project, warts and all. Perhaps it can be said that it has become a prisoner of its own success, because we have come to take peace and prosperity for granted. Little Englanders, wrapped in illusion, romance and anti-establishment sentiment, believe that they can have more prosperity and more of yesterday by leaving the EU. Yet, the elites of the EU have protected the very common man who for centuries was used as cannon fodder by national elites and who now rebels without understanding of the own interest. Not so different from the heir to part of the great estate. Being part of the estate provides protection, without the estate he and his will be lost when bets go sour.

Democracy is a wonderful institution, and direct democracy through referenda is wonderful when citizens are asked to decide on matters affecting only them. But direct democracy is not so good when the question to be answered affects patrimony, affects also other citizens without a vote, affects future generations. For such questions the logic of representative democracy is more persuasive, because representative democracy provides a degree of distance to the passions of the day. Elitist, certainly, but elitism is not always bad, is not bad when it, in fact, serves the common interest. Centuries of experience show that representative democracy does mostly that.

There is also a sting in the tail of direct democracy. Referenda are not reserved for the discontent. Should the UK vote to leave, I wonder if the other members of the family, the citizens of the 27 other EU states, should not be asked about the conditions for UK leaving and for a new agreement of association. Should this be the case I foresee stormy weather for an island nation that may realise the painful truth that no man and no nation are, in fact, an island!

It is certainly unfair to suggest that two hearts were beating in the chest of Muhammad Ali. Throughout his life, even when illness decimated his faculties, Ali seemed to be one; THE ONE he would have said. So why suggest that both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali have died? Perhaps in order remember that with the man dies the boy, but particularly in order to remember that Cassius made Ali. Even if Ali was always one, the Ali we knew grew irrepressibly from the life of Cassius Clay. Changing the name was for Ali a renaissance, and it became part of a rebirth of the dialogue on race relations, now in a far more assertive mode. Yet, Muhammad Ali was more than a catalyst of race discussions. He became a forger of the spirit of the times, not just a prism as some will have it. Ali forced us to face our prejudices in so many ways.

Cassius Clay is in some respects a proud name, the Roman Cassius and the alliteration with Clay. The snap of the four syllables.The name may have had its roots in white injustice, a slave name he said, but it also heralded the proud, upright stance of a self-possesed human being. In a sense it heralded the conversion to Muhammad Ali.

But Cassius Clay is also the name of a fighter, where Muhammad Ali signals spirit above fists. Ali was a great boxer, there is no doubt, but what conquered Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman was the spirit not the fists. Muhammad Ali taught us a lesson by this, a lesson of humanity. What he taught us was that god-given ability should be driven by spirit – and only comes into its own when spirit is the animator. He also taught us to be upright, to be proud and to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they come.

Cassius Clay was the greatest, Muhammad Ali even greater! Muhammad Ali had flaws, of course, many wrongheaded opinions, but he was never slave, always free! He showed us what being human means – what it can mean, what it should mean!

So adieu, you Ali being born of Cassius. We praise you for your indomitable soul, for your inspiration, for a life well lived!

Donald Trump is often accused of having no core values. This I find highly unfair. Throughout Mr. Trump’s life and career there is one perspective that has never changed or faded, and that is his admirable love of himself. Despite a highly unlovable nature Donald Trump’s love of Donald Trump has never wavered, never been in question. How enviable that is! This is clearly what Mr. Trump’s many supporters think. We choose our leaders not only for where they lead, but to partake in their aura. Americans partly chose John F. Kennedy because they hoped that his youthful dynamism and optimism was a projection of their own qualities. And perhaps it was! The supporters of Donald Trump hope that his self-love will lead to their own self-love, that his petulance will reinforce their own, that his lack of reflection and knowledge will justify their own such lack. An America led by Donald Trump is frightening, an America becoming Donald Trump even more so!

This leads me to another, related, point. A stable of the Trump repertoire is the branding. Everything touched by Mr. Trump will immediate be given the Trump pre-fix, Trump Towers, Trump Turnberry, the horrible Donald J. Trump Signature Collection of ties and shirts. A Trump presidency will bring not only the Trump White House, meaning the Trump administration, but the Trump White House, as in the building with its rebranded name flashing in neon. And then, of course, we shall have Washington, District of Donald Trump (DDT), Trump Manhattan, Donald J. Trump New York, Donald Delaware, the USTA – you get the picture.

Is there a way out of this? In the past couple of years there has been a lot of media buzz about the possibility of a one-way ticket to Mars. I have argued against this on ethical grounds, but I am now starting to change my mind. I wonder if we can induce Mr. Trump to go on such a trip if we promise him that we will rename the destination Trump Mars?

There is something wonderful about being woken up by church bells in a foreign city! The chiming seems to lift you, to synthesise you, almost to cleanse you!

Last Saturday this was my experience in Trieste. The good cheer was reinforced by the sunny weather that had defied the forecasts of rain. Sipping coffee in Caffè Degli Specchi and see the world go by is a treat.

Now, you could easily assume that there would be something melancholy about Trieste – the great port of the vanished Habsburg Empire, all the Habsburg era buildings, the site of Miramare, the palace of Archduke Maximillian, who as Emperor of Mexico was executed by republicans after a tumultuous three year reign. Yet, there is no melancholy at all. Trieste is a normal Italian city through and through, and even the rain the day after did not seem to affect spirits. The dogs appeared in raincoats and made sure they looked chic, just as their owners in theirs.

What was truly melancholy was the May Day demonstration on Piazza dell’ Unità. At first there were only three red flag with their carriers, and no one else. John Lennon’s Imagine blared from the loudspeakers with the hope that ‘some day you’ll join us’ as a sort of incantation. Eventually a few hundred people turned up, more of a Grey Panther parade than anything else. The decline was palpable.

My conclusion was that Trieste has moved on, and that the labour movement has not. Trieste seems to have taken the best of Habsburg and turned it into something new, something Italian. The labour movement seems to have the face firmly towards the past, unable to adapt to a new reality. The fall of the Habsburg Empire, with all its traditionalisms at the end, is a demonstration of the pitfalls of such an approach! Beware – not only the labour movement!

Most of the ills of society are caused by corruption. Corruption in a broad sense, it is true, but still corruption. The Holocaust was corruption in a genocidal form, elite corruption in North Korea has given birth to its nuclear threat, and the poverty in Africa is, in so many ways, a result of corruption. The crisis in Ukraine has been exacerbated by corruption, and China’s amazing rise is gravely endangered by economic and political corruption. Corruption is both a cause and a tragic accompaniment of the Syrian exodus.  Whenever greed and envy get the upper hand, corruption finds its mate!

But let us not despair – let us look at what can be practically achieved. Doing so, we should be ambitious, but not so ambitious as to necessarily fail. In his great book, The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen argues for practical justice in the sense of doing what most people can agree is right in a specific situation. Better this than to always strive for an abstract ideal on which no consensus can be found and which therefore stands in the way of progress. If we follow this wise advice we should probably first look at what the legal system can be made to achieve in terms of fighting corruption. And this necessitates looking at corruption in the narrower meaning of trading illegitimate favours against monetary gain.

You may well argue that national legal systems have already, over centuries, demonstrated that they cannot be an effective remedy against economic corruption. Societies are woefully unable to fight corruption because those who should are those already carrying the black mark of the disease. Societies are unable to fight corruption because national societies are seen as individual bubbles shielded by sovereignty from interference by global society. Sovereignty, which was intended to ensure freedom for populations, has in many poverty stricken regions been turned into a tool for national elites to enslave the common person of the nations they have been given responsibility for. Global elites stand idly by, either because they themselves are rapacious, or because they hail the ideal of sovereignty without wanting to see where practically it takes many of the populations it was supposed to benefit. There is very little consolation for the starving child in being exploited by a national elite rather than by foreigners. This is the reality we refuse to see, or which we refuse to take action against!

But we could take action, and, in principle, it is easy, even if, in practice, it might be hard. All countries in the world have laws prohibiting corruption. This is surely true even for North Korea! This means that everybody engaging in corruption is clear on the fact that he or she engages in a crime. The feeling of impunity comes from the assumption that the corruption laws cannot be enforced. The most sacred principle of criminal lawyers is nullum crime sine lege, no crime without a corresponding law. Yet, criminal lawyers can sleep easily, because the law is there – corruption is not just an ethical infraction.

There is no equally sacred principle in criminal law giving the criminal a right to be judged only by a court of his or her own nationality. And herein lies opportunity!

The opportunity might not be so big as to assume that every state can punish any act of corruption no matter where and by whom it is committed. This kind of universal jurisdiction could set the stage for a hijacking of the corruption agenda for national rivalry purposes and could be abused by publicity seeking lawyers. Recent attempts at using universal jurisdiction to prosecute the most severe human rights violations have come to grief and in any event such an expansive view of jurisdiction would ignore the admonition of Amartya Sen to seek first and foremost realisable justice.

So what is realisable? The UN Security Council has in the past used its powers to set up tribunals to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and acts of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia. Yet, sadly, when you look at the membership of the Security Council it is clear that no similar action can be expected for corruption. There is no Security Council backed International Corruption Tribunal in the horizon. The Sen test of practicability cannot be passed.

What we can do, however, is to create an international protocol on corruption enforcement which countries of good will can sign up for. By doing so they would accept that violations of their own anti-corruption legislation can be prosecuted before an international tribunal when national enforcement is found by an international prosecutor to be deficient. This would be similar to the system of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, except that the system would be simpler, because the crimes that would be prosecuted would not need to be defined anew. The international tribunal would just give effect to the law that would apply to the crime in any event.

Perhaps only few states would sign up at the start, but often the best international governance systems are the result of a gradual recognition that something effective will have to be done to combat a societal ill. At the start there might be few – but at the end there might be many, just because the solution comes to be recognised as right and effective.

The corruption disease attacks most severely weak, poverty stricken countries with poor governance systems. Yet, if wealthy, strong states do not show the way and renounce this particular devil and all his works then surely he will continue his rule! In the final analysis nobody is served by that – not even the corrupt!