Defenders of Boris Johnson are telling mutinous Tory MPs not to focus solely on the dolce vita lifestyle enjoyed in No 10 when the rest of the population was locked up at home. Instead, they ask those who want rid of the Prime Minister to view his achievements more generally, citing his taking Britain out of the EU, winning the general election in 2019, and overseeing the vaccine programme.

Ignore the validity of these claims for the moment and, taking Johnson loyalists at their word, consider his position against the backdrop of British history. It is not premature to do so because, even if he clings on as Prime Minister, his freedom of action will be limited which means that his political heritage is already in place. Important questions requiring an answer include how far he is a one-trick pony who rose to power thanks to his populist nationalism, which was ideally suited to political currents during the era of Brexit? Equally important, how far will his premiership be seen as an aberration rather than as a permanent transformation of British politics?

Boozing and partying by politicians and civil servants who were simultaneously ordering everybody else to live in conditions of semi-siege is grossly hypocritical. But their behaviour was in keeping with the self-indulgence shown by populist nationalist leaders elsewhere in the world. It is always striking how, for all Johnsons British boosterism, his actions mirror those of populists in the rest of the world.

There are specific reasons why Johnsons leadership should be tottering a year after his supporters were boasting that he might be in power for a decade. His successes took place while Dominic Cummings was directing his actions and, once he lost his chief adviser, he wobbled from misjudgement to misjudgement. Downing Street increasingly resembled the court of a minor monarch in the 18th century, with consorts and courtiers vying for the kings ear.

Populist nationalist movements are not new, but in their modern version, they have proved to be the worlds most powerful political force over the past decade.

But they have tended to produce permanent instability and frequent crises from the US to Hungary and from Britain to Brazil. This is because populist leaders lead unwieldy coalitions made up of contradictory interests. A good word for these movements is pluto-populist with plutocrats and the well-off in uneasy alliance with marginalised victims of globalisation. Donald Trump was absurdly nicknamed the blue-collar billionaire by his supporters when he became Republican presidential candidate in 2016.

Johnsons brand of populism is more muted with its levelling up slogan which is still awaiting a much-delayed White Paper spelling out what it means two years after the general election. Business investment is below what it was prior to the referendum and mean real average weekly pay is still lower than in 2007. No wonder red wall Tory MPs are rebellious.

The Johnsonian brand of British nationalism is similarly in trouble. Future historians chronicling his career may point to his role in the 2016 Brexit referendum as the moment when he played a truly decisive role, because without his intervention the vote might have gone the other way. His other achievements are all more dubious: any Tory leader would have won the last general election against a divided Labour Party and credit for the vaccine belongs primarily to the scientists and the NHS, which would have got the support of any British government in power.

Britain has declined as an international power under Johnson, something which was inevitable once Brexit weakened its links to its allies and main trading partners in Europe. Friction with France and Ireland, Britains two closest geographical neighbours, has become the norm. The position of England within the British Isles as a whole is less secure than at any time over the last 300 years, with the SNP dominant in Scotland and Sinn Fin likely to become the largest political party in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland in the next few years.

Yet it would be nave to attribute all of Britains ills to Johnson and his government because, like all governments, their control over events is less than they pretend. Much that has gone wrong with the NHS during the epidemic, for example, is because the health service was weakened by underfunding under David Cameron and George Osborne. But the root of the problem stretches back over 70 years since Britain has always tried to have a top-class health service on the cheap, leaving it with far fewer doctors and hospital beds per head of population than in France and Germany.

One damaging feature of the Johnson years is symbolised by the No 10 parties. They may appear to be trivial but they exemplify a feckless frivolity, a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan lack of seriousness, that flavours everything the Government tries to do.

What worries me is the casual political vandalism, Jonathan Powell, the chief negotiator of the peace accords in Northern Ireland, is quoted as saying. They really dont seem to care. I mean the damage they are doing to the very fragile political settlements in Northern Ireland by posturing. A similar disengagement from reality was on show when the Foreign Office failed even to read the emails containing pleas for help from Afghans with British connections during the fall of Kabul.

It is not too early to try to identify the main consequences of the Johnson era, even if he does stay in office, because in future he will be damaged and vulnerable and bent on survival. This might be no bad thing because his ability to do wrong will be curtailed as he loses his ability to take control of events.

But a wounded populist is a dangerous thing, as Donald Trump has shown as he spews out calls to arms to rally his core supporters. Johnson is reacting in a somewhat similar fashion, threatening the BBC, one of the few remaining British institutions with real prestige in the world, with defunding and sending the Royal Navy to stop refugees crossing the Channel.

There is an egotism and an irresponsibility about Johnson at bay that is breathtaking and it will probably get worse. He may not have started the decline of Britain, but he has certainly speeded it up.

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Boris Johnsons populism may be muted, but it is still accelerating Britains decline - iNews

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The latest Tory threat to use the navy to stop refugees in the English Channel has been ripped to shreds. This week Boris Johnson, possibly to distract from his partying habits, signed off on a cruel and inhumane plan to hand control of the channel to the military. But two security scholars have pulled this pledge apart.

Professor Timothy Edmonds and research associate Scott Edwards, both from the University of Bristol, published their critique in The Conversation. The pair looked at key Tory claims around the issue. But they werent particularly convinced.

Home secretary Priti Patel then told the Commons on Tuesday 18 January, that she had commissioned the MoD [Ministry of Defence] as a crucial operational partner to protect our Channel against illegal migration. She spoke of a blended approach which she said the public would support.

While the Ministry of Defence said:

Unacceptable numbers of people continue to make the dangerous Channel crossings and last Novembers tragic deaths serve as the strongest reminder of the need to stop them.

The Bristol academics debunking starts with the maths. They said that while on the face of it navy ships outnumber Border Force ships, this is itself deceiving. The Archer and River class ships which would be most useful are already in use as far away as the Indo-Pacific, Gibraltar, the Caribbean and the Falklands/Malvinas.

They added:

Read on...

With so many vessels already in use elsewhere, it seems unlikely that the Admiralty will welcome new deployments to the Channel - especially so soon after anannouncementthat Border Force is receiving money for an upgraded fleet of cutters.

So it seems that the navy lacks the ships for the task, and the political will to do the job anyway.

Secondly, the pair questioned how naval involvement would change anything even if the capacity was found. They also tested the underlying motivations:

Perhaps there is a hope that the Royal Navy will put some backbone into this policy, especially given that Border Forces union has recentlythreatened strikes if pushbacks are implemented.

But would the navy even have the authority to carry out the governments cruel and inhumane anti-refugee operations? Legally, this doesnt seem to be the case at all.

Edmonds and Edward warned that if the navy did start to push back small boats crossing the channel, they would breach long established maritime law:

This is enshrined inArticle 98of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea andelsewhere. The Royal Navy is just as bound by the law of the sea as Border Force.

They wrote:

The navy has already indicated that it haslittle appetite for such pushbacks, and any extra capacity it can bring is most likely to be deployed in search and rescue tasks.

This leads to questions about what the navy can actually do in the Channel. As the authors point out, not much more than they already are. The authors registered surprise at the announcement of a blended response. Because that is exactly whats already happening.

They say the navy has been increasingly integrated into border operations since 2010. One recent expression of this blended approach is:

The Joint Maritime Security Centre, established in 2020, coordinates the UKs maritime assets and helps different agencies to work together at sea. Hosted by the navy, it enables cross-agency information sharing through itsMaritime Domain Awareness programme.

So if this is already happening and has been for a decade we should question why Priti Patel is calling for it anyway.

Edmonds and Edwards proposed a different approach. They said:

The UK needs to move beyond populist announcements on the small boat problem and develop a response along three lines.

First, it should continue to develop better interagency operations. Secondly, it should foster closer cooperation with France and Belgium to help manage this shared problem of human desperation and misery. And thirdly, it should recognise that policing at sea can only addresssymptoms rather than causes of increased Channel crossings.

They added:

A long-term solution requires the reestablishment of humane and accessible refugee and migration routes into the UK.

The Tories have made a habit of using refugee-bashing and the militarist populism to distract from their internal problems. This latest call looks much the same. But this time the incoherence of such callous inhumane plans has been laid bare.

Johnson and Patel seem oblivious to the fact theyve blood on their hands when it comes to refugees crossing the Channel and instead want to talk the talk. But even if the navy did have the capacity to intervene in the channel, doing so does nothing to address the root causes of the refugee crisis.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/LA Phot Nicky Wilson, cropped to 770 x 440, under Open Government Licence.

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Patel's navy Channel threat once again exposes the Tory's militarist populism - The Canary

Faster internet access has significantly weakened civic participation in Britain, according to a study that found involvement in political parties, trade unions and volunteering fell as web speeds rose.

Volunteering in social care fell by more than 10% when people lived closer to local telecoms exchange hubs and so enjoyed faster web access. Involvement in political parties fell by 19% with every 1.8km increase in proximity to a hub. By contrast, the arrival of fast internet had no significant impact on interactions with family and friends.

The analysis of behaviour among hundreds of thousands of people led by academics from Cardiff University and Sapienza University of Rome found faster connection speeds may have reduced the likelihood of civic engagement among close to 450,000 people more than double the estimated membership of the Conservative party. They found that as internet speeds rose between 2005 and 2018, time online crowded out other forms of civic engagement.

The studys authors have also speculated that the phenomenon may have helped fuel populism as peoples involvement with initiatives for the common good, which they say are effectively schools of democracy where people learn the benefit of cooperation, has declined.

Other studies have shown that social media engagement has strengthened other kinds of civic engagement, for example by helping to organise protests and fuelling an interest in politics, even if it does not manifest in traditional forms of participation.

However, politics conducted online has been found to be more susceptible to filter bubbles, which limit participants exposure to opposing views and so foster polarisation.

We observed that civic participation and the form of engagement in the activities of voluntary organisations and political participation declined with proximity to the network, said Fabio Sabatini, a co-author of the study. Fast internet seems to crowd out this kind of social engagement.

Face-to-face volunteering in the UK has been in decline for substantial periods in recent history. It fell from 2005 to 2011 and again in 2020 as Covid-19 hit, according to separate analysis by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

The new study, published in the Journal of Public Economics, gathered information from the communications regulator Ofcom about the location of local internet cabling exchanges, which during the period studied were a key determinant of data speeds. It then cross-referenced this with residents survey responses from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study about their engagement with social organisations.

The combined effect on engagement with organisations such as political parties, unions and professional associations was a 6% reduction in participation from 2010 to 2017 for each 1.8km closer to the local exchange someone lived.

The biggest impact was on political party involvement, while the impact on trade unions was far smaller a 3.6% reduction. That chimes with estimates of declining membership of the main UK parties over the period studied, with the exception of a spike caused by a surge in Labour membership before Jeremy Corbyns election as party leader in 2015.

The decline in political parties appeal when internet speeds rise compared with unions may be because political parties only indirectly safeguard their supporters particular interests [while] trade unions have a stronger and more explicit commitment to advocate for their members, the study suggested.

The effect on volunteering with organisations that deliver social care and environmental improvements as well as the Scouts, which have been defined by sociologists as instilling habits of cooperation, solidarity, and public-spiritedness, was measured at a 7.8% reduction.

These kinds of organisations have been defined as schools of democracy where people learn the benefit of cooperation Sabatini said, adding that involvement with such organisations also helped people to trust strangers.

The rise of populism has been linked to a decline in interest in public affairs and we thought that, being less politically and socially active, people may be less capable of interpreting political phenomena and understanding the complexity of the management of public affairs, Sabatini said.

While bonding social capital [family and friends] seems resilient to technological change, bridging social capital [politics, volunteering, unions] proves fragile and vulnerable to the pressure of technology, the study concluded.

This result is disturbing as it suggests that progress in information and communications technology can undermine an essential factor of economic activity and the functioning of democratic institutions.

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Faster internet speeds linked to lower civic engagement in UK - The Guardian

By and large, we know what we mean by technocracy: the delegation of public authority to an elite cadre with some sort of scientific expertise, their legitimacy derived from their superior knowledge. In a technocracy, decisions can be challenged only by other experts. Everyone else must sit back and watch.

Its less clear what we mean by populism, since the term is used for so many different things. Most current definitions share the idea of a people divided and short-changed by an elite, and who come to consciousness by pushing that elite aside, replacing it with a new leadership that has a relationship of something like mystical unity with the people. Populism, on the left and the right, promises a social unity achieved through politics and the state, overcoming division by eliminating the enemies of the common people the capitalists in left populism, non-nationals of various sorts in the populism of the right. While elite rule divides the people into self-seeking factions, populism unites them, in a struggle against those who claim to know better than the masses what the masses need.

In their attempt to understand todays post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note overlooked commonalities between technocracy and populism which, they argue, allow for an unlikely synthesis between the two. Both involve the replacement of an old elite, one that is seen as technically incompetent or parasitic, with a new one that is more proficient or more responsive. Both see political legitimacy as rooted in unanimity, involving the indisputably best solutions to indisputably collective problems.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti suggest that technopopulism entails a claim to legitimacy on the part of new political actors who are seeking power after the long-drawn-out decay of postwar democracy the state-managed capitalism of the class compromise that began to unravel in the late 1970s. It promises to do away with the deadlocked factionalism, ideological divisions and party political corruption that cause the failure of contemporary politics to resolve the crises affecting contemporary societies. Technopopulism advises us to turn governance over to independent experts who are not corrupted by involvement in the politics of the past and have no personal or ideological commitment to old-style political parties. Policymaking is redefined as problem-solving, avoiding both the technical deficiencies and the social divisions associated with parliamentary democracy. As populist politics restores the unity of the people, that unity allows technocracy to serve the people by solving their problems.

Technopopulism, Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti claim, is an emerging reality in several European countries where the failings of traditional party democracy have eroded its legitimacy. They analyse five such cases. Three of them the UK under New Labour, France under Macron, and the Italian Five Star Movement are classified as pure: leaders present themselves as neither left nor right, but separate from the politics of the past. The other two cases, Podemos in Spain and the Lega in Italy, are described as hybrid: Podemos fashions itself as a far left party and the Lega as a far right one.

A detailed discussion of the five cases must be left to specialists. To explain whether and how the technopopulist tendencies described by Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti are present beyond France, the UK and Italy, it seems useful to consider the long rule of Angela Merkel, whose regime did have technopopulist traits, though what was presented as non-partisan problem-solving tended to be driven by quite traditional politics aimed at stabilising Merkels electoral base. Ultimately this project failed. All her technopopulist rhetoric achieved was to establish a temporary and fragile period of quasi-presidential personal rule under a parliamentary constitution. There is, it seems, no technopopulist cure for the decline of political parties and social institutions as mechanisms enabling political and social integration in a neoliberal society. Post-democratic politics, in whatever form, cannot pacify conflict-ridden capitalist society.

Merkel was always noted for her astonishing political flexibility you could also call it a remarkable lack of principles or ideological commitment. It was often attributed to a deep-seated pragmatism. She never seemed to feel the need to explain herself, to rationalise decisions by fitting them into a coherent political project, and made no memorable speeches expressing her feelings or beliefs in her sixteen years in office. She didnt waver from the fundamentals of the (West) German politics she inherited: membership of Nato, the EU and the EMU, alliance with France and the United States, a pursuit of open world markets for German manufacturing. But when it came to keeping her social and political bloc together, she was willing and able to live with stark contradictions that might have torn other governments apart.

When she was elected leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 2000, Merkel aspired to be the German Thatcher, arguing for the full neoliberal programme, including the abolishment of free collective bargaining and worker participation in management. But when she almost lost her first election in 2005, and had to govern through a grand coalition a coalition with Germanys other major party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) she soon discovered that she could attract or, just as usefully, demobilise middle-class SPD voters by appropriating social democratic policies. Then, in 2011, the Atomkanzlerin the nuclear energy chancellor who had invoked her authority as a physicist to tell voters that nuclear power plants were safe, reversed her position after the Fukushima disaster and decided to phase out nuclear energy, a policy of the SPD/Green government of Gerhard Schrder and Joschka Fischer that she had fought tooth and nail.

Another volte face came in the summer of 2015. To repair several PR blunders over immigration policy, to woo the Greens, and perhaps to placate the Obama administration, which was annoyed by Germanys refusal to send ground troops to Syria or Libya, Merkel opened Germanys borders to roughly one million migrants, mostly from Syria. While this met with enthusiastic support among the middle class, it caused a profound split in her party and both saved and radicalised the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which had seemed about to decline into insignificance. Without a formal mandate from the other EU states, Merkel then negotiated a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdoan, under which Turkey would receive billions of euros for preventing Syrian and other migrants crossing into Europe. Towards the end of her chancellorship, she was applauded as at once a supporter of open borders and a defender of Europe against uncontrolled immigration. She was also widely regarded as a model of environmentalism, even though her turn away from nuclear energy prolonged Germanys need to burn coal by more than a decade.

What enabled this remarkable sequence of reversals? The answer lies in both character and social structure. For the first 35 years of her life, Merkel was a well-adjusted but not particularly enthusiastic citizen of the GDR, before rising to power after reunification in the CDU, the most West German political party, in hardly more than a decade. During the 1990s, centre right parties like the CDU/CSU (the Christian Social Union is the CDUs Bavarian sister party) went through an existential crisis which many of them, such as the Italian Democrazia Cristiana, did not survive a crisis well described by Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti. Such parties tended effectively to be coalitions, with members supporting one of three political positions: capitalist modernism, anti-communism, or Catholic-patriarchal traditionalism, especially with respect to work and family. These coalitions fell apart under the pressure of the accelerated capitalist development that accompanied neoliberalism, as international competition made capitalist rationalisation spread beyond national markets and workplaces, as women took advantage of growing opportunities for paid work outside the family, and as communism finally collapsed. (A similar crisis befell most centre left parties, originally coalitions between a now shrinking working class and a growing white-collar middle class, but now placing their hopes in what they saw as an expanding non-manual and entrepreneurial labour market.) Conservative centrism became increasingly unable to project a coherent vision of a good life and a good society to which all its factions could subscribe, and conservative politics found it necessary to distance itself from old ideologies and identities, and to attempt to move to a new politics free from traditional precepts.

Merkel turned out to be a godsend to the ailing CDU. Helmut Kohl had resigned as leader after his defeat by Schrder in the 1998 federal election. Indebted to none of the CDU cliques, Merkel was profoundly indifferent to attempts to define a new programme for a party overrun by economic, social and cultural change. She realised more quickly than everyone else that the old politics had had its day and that the time had come to try something new, responding to particular events rather than taking an ideological position, oriented to the present instead of a hoped-for future, dealing with one crisis at a time, unencumbered by principle or precedent.

Eventist politics of this kind suit a society that has lost its sense of location in a historical movement from past to present, and present to future. Theres no such thing as society, the much underrated social theorist Margaret Thatcher proclaimed. There are individual men and women and there are families. Unlike Thatcher, Merkel never lectured her public. Rather than demanding that people change their lives get on their bikes, as Thatchers minister Norman Tebbit put it she made the state seem like a service company, ready to fix peoples problems so that they could continue to live as they pleased. This helped to counter a perception of the world as fundamentally incoherent. No large plan, no holistic approach can be of help in such a world, only fast and flexible responses to dangers as they arise, carried out by an experienced leader with a strong capacity for improvisation.

Can this be considered technopopulism? In a sense it can. For the new conservatism, crises arise from disorder, not from a wrong order, and their handling should be entrusted to technicians in command of special knowledge, whether scientific or magical, or both (they are hard to distinguish for the political consumer). Merkel never claimed to be an economist, or a lawyer, or an expert in foreign policy or military strategy. She did, however, have herself described by her communications team, and sometimes described herself, as privy to knowledge of a special kind: that of a scientist trained to solve problems by analysing them from the desired outcome backwards.

In this way, Merkel presented herself as the embodiment of the hard-to-translate German concept of Sachlichkeit. The closest English equivalents are objectivity and matter-of-factness, to the extent that they imply an emotional detachment from the problem at hand, and a concentration on its specific demands and internal logic. But, looking at Merkels years in office, its clear that her dominant concern wasnt with finding the optimal solutions to specific issues, but with the age-old basics of governance: the building and maintenance of a sustainable governing majority a technical approach, yes, that addressed problems as they arose, but which saw them as problems of politics rather than policy. Post-ideological, but certainly not post-political.

When Merkel turned away from nuclear energy, for example, what she was looking for was not a safer method of energy generation but a stable government majority. It wasnt physics that carried the day in 2011, but Merkels now favourite science, polling, which showed that the Germans had had it with nuclear energy. The end she had in mind was not public safety but political realignment: a durable coalition with the Greens. They would replace not just the liberal Free Democratic Party (FPD), which was too suspicious of Merkels social democratic mimicry and too headstrong in foreign affairs, but also the SPD, which as a formerly socialist party must have seemed unreliable to this former citizen of the GDR and in any case was too big to be a sufficiently compliant partner. It was for a similar reason that Merkel, eager to shed her ice queen image in parts of the German press, allowed the refugees to enter Germany in 2015.

If we accept that this is a version of technocracy, was there also an element of populism? Passionate appeals to the German people were alien to Merkel, who seems always to have been keenly aware of the pitfalls of German history for German politics and the countrys reputation abroad. Germany and the German people were hers only to the extent that they followed her; in an hour-long audience she gave to her favourite television journalist during the open border crisis she said: If we now have to apologise for showing a friendly face in an emergency, then this is not my country. The populus in Merkels politics was not a German but a European one, though one governed and structured as much as possible along German lines, through the single market and, in particular, the EMU. Under Merkel, it was the Europe of the EU that was the imagined community of German politics, a nation in the making, forging the peoples of Europe into an ever closer union a community without conflict and contradictions governed expertly by a well-meaning elite.

In the German collective consciousness, Europe has long taken the place of Germany, which is seen as an outdated and outgrown political shell, an embarrassing historical legacy. Populist appeals to the German people are rarely made in Germany, except of course by the AfD, while Europe is frequently invoked as both the ultimate objective and the legitimate location of (post-)German (post-)national policy. Merkel herself may have preferred Europe for more than just historical reasons. The kind of political decision-making she favours closely resembles that characteristic of the EU: decontextualized, event-driven, legitimised by expert opinion rather than agreed through public debate and negotiation, with deep structural problems treated as superficial political ones. The politics of Sachlichkeit allow potentially democratic nation-states to be replaced by a technocratic superstate, and class conflict to be replaced by international macroeconomic management.

Merkels record, and that of her brand of technopopulism, was far from impressive when it mattered most to her. In three of the four elections in which she stood as party leader (2005, 2009 and 2017), the CDU/CSU did worse than it had at the previous election; its vote also declined in 2021. Only in 2013 did the CDU vote go up, from 33.8 per cent to 41.5 per cent. Four years later, it was down to 32.9 per cent, and four years after that to 24.1 per cent. If the hidden agenda of Merkels technopopulism was to establish a new bourgeois centre, extending the CDU/CSU vote by adding recruits from the Greens, it failed spectacularly. In 2009 Merkel broke with her marriage of convenience with the SPD to form a government with the liberal FDP, which had had its best ever election result, winning 14.5 per cent of the vote. Marginalised and humiliated by Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schuble, who came to see the FDP as competing for rather than adding to their voter base, the FDP was voted out of the Bundestag four years later, winning less than 5 per cent of the vote. The Fukushima incident which took place towards the middle of Merkels second term, in March 2011 then offered an ideal opportunity for reorganising the political centre. Merkels Energiewende (energy turn) paid off in the 2013 election. But while the SPD vote also increased (though only by 2.7 per cent), the Green vote dropped, from 10.7 to 8.4 per cent, with Merkel getting almost all the credit for a policy change that was high on the Green agenda. As a result of all this, Merkel found herself forced into another grand coalition.

Her next opportunity to rebuild Germanys political centre came in 2015, with the opening of Germanys borders, to the applause of German Willkommenskultur. This, too, backfired. Two years later, in 2017, the CDU/CSU and the SPD vote dropped dramatically, while the Greens stagnated. The FDP, which had kept silent in 2015, rebounded, and the AfD, fiercely opposed to immigration in any form, entered the Bundestag for the first time at 12.6 per cent. Merkels overture to the Greens had caused her party to do badly enough that the coalition for the sake of which she had made this move was once again impossible. When she tried to put together a three-party coalition by adding the FDP, its leaders remembered how she had treated them before and bowed out at the last minute. It was only after heavy pressure from the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an SPD foreign minister in an earlier grand coalition, that the SPD could be convinced to join a government under Merkel for the third time.

The 2017 election was the beginning of the end for Merkel. When the CDU lost heavily in a Land election in 2018, it allowed her to continue as chancellor until the 2021 election only if she resigned as party chair. In 2021 the CDU/CSU ended up on 24.1 per cent while the Greens won a record 14.8 per cent, but this, once again, wasnt enough to make up for the CDU/CSUs losses. The AfD vote remained stable, as did the FDPs. The SPD vote went up by 5.2 per cent, leaving it 1.6 percentage points ahead of the CDU/CSU, and enabling its candidate, Olaf Scholz, Merkels sitting finance minister, to become chancellor in a three-party government with the Greens and the FDP.

Merkels unhappy ending shows that technopopulism is not necessarily any more durable than old-fashioned centrist conservatism. Realising that the centrism of the postwar era was collapsing, Merkel had been grooming the Greens as a next-generation bourgeois centre party, but she couldnt overcome the logic of popular politics. There is no insurance in politics against bad luck, unanticipated side effects, or strategic miscalculation. Technopopulism seems to have a succession problem and a smooth succession is essential to the stability of a regime. Armin Laschet, the candidate for chancellor on whom the CDU/CSU agreed after a long battle, had nothing in his favour other than his loyalty to her and his promise to be exactly the same kind of leader. Anything else would have drawn her ire, as her initial favourite, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, could confirm, and would also have caused still more divisions inside the party. Even if we ignore the possibility that some centrist voters may have wanted at least a degree of change, Laschet had no way of proving himself. Without being chancellor, he couldnt demonstrate the problem-solving pragmatism, the skills of technopopulist post-democratic leadership, that had been the hallmark of Merkels rule, or at least its public faade. The only person who could do this at all was Scholz, who made a point during the campaign of presenting himself to the voters as Merkels legitimate heir, even adopting some of her characteristic hand gestures.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti place their hope for a restoration of democracy on the rebuilding of political parties as intermediaries between particular and general social interests. Here, the book falls short in a number of respects, raising the question, rarely discussed among social scientists, of whether pointing out a problem necessarily creates the obligation to suggest a solution, however flimsy. Not every problem can be fixed.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti are remarkably selective about the institutions that need to be rebuilt to enable a return from technopopulism to democracy. Before the victory of neoliberalism, it was taken for granted that in order to resolve the differences between competing interests, capitalist democracy required not just a functioning party and parliamentary system but also a system that made room for negotiation between employers and workers. There was wide acceptance of the idea that, in a capitalist political economy, trade unions in whatever form, varying from country to country could provide what the Norwegian political scientist Stein Rokkan called a second tier of government, one that recognised and dealt with the class conflict between capital and labour in a way party democracy could not.

Recently, democratic theory has focused almost exclusively on the state, neglecting industrial democracy. The assumption is that society-wide consensus will come about through rational discourse, as though class interests can be adjudicated by means of public debate and some notion of shared values. Trade unionism and collectivism are entirely excluded from the neoliberal understanding of the political economy. This, perversely, allows current democratic theory to do without a concept of capitalism, trivialising if not altogether excluding the fundamental conflict between those creating and those owning the capital on whose profitable deployment the fate of a capitalist society depends. The aim of state democracy, as contemporary theorists see it, is to achieve the normative unity of a classless society of equals. They imagine the formation through public debate of a consensus on the just distribution of something whose distribution cannot by its nature be just. Settlements between ultimately incompatible class interests under capitalism must come about through conflict, even if that conflict is institutionally contained by bargaining between unequals, not reasoning among equals. Rescuing democracy from technopopulist distortion without conceiving it as democracy-in-opposition-to-capitalism looks like a fairly hopeless endeavour.

This conception of a state democracy that produces normative unity is closer to populism, especially statist right-wing populism, than it may seem. Indeed, there are striking affinities between the Habermasian liberal image of politics as a way of overcoming dissent through public argument and the populist utopia of a people united in and by their belief in the collective values embodied in the constitution of the state. The desired result differs sharply middle-class v. plebeian political rule but what these conceptions have in common is that both fail to allow for the relentless obstruction and disruption of social and political integration that is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. Democratic theory without a theory of class conflict pretends that there can be normative unity despite material disunity a normative unity that is more than the manufactured consent described by Noam Chomsky.

Quite apart from Bickerton and Invernizzi Accettis implicit separation of political science from political economy, there seems to be a good deal of wishful thinking behind their call for a return to party democracy. While the disintegration of postwar party systems in the 1990s may have contributed to the rise of technopopulism, it didnt happen out of the blue, but was caused by the rapid progress of capitalist modernisation, which blew apart the precarious coalitions both within and between the centre parties that kept postwar democratic capitalism together. Capitalism, indeed turbocapitalism, is still around, and if a new kind of party system is to take over the mediating functions of its predecessor, the least one would expect is that it would reflect the disruptions that capitalist progress is bound to inflict on the societies it revolutionises.

Capitalism produces winners and losers, and democracy under capitalism must offer the losers a chance to make up through politics something of what they have to yield to the market to correct market justice through something like social justice. This requires a political space that provides a society not only with alternatives to argue about, but with a real choice between them. If that space is too narrow or restrictive, politics is likely to be diverted to issues of moral rectitude about which one cannot disagree without bringing into question peoples right to exist in society. This, too, is something that populism and left liberalism seem to have in common.

It is important to remember that almost no such political space exists for EU member states, which may be the most important reason that European politics, more than any national politics, tries to be populist and technocratic at the same time. Under the single market, debates on limits to the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital are pointless. The treaties between member states preclude any such limits and are enforced by a supranational court against whose rulings there is no recourse. If a country is also a member of the EMU, its fiscal policies have to observe strict guidelines and its yearly budgets must be inspected. Again, all this is excluded from public debate because it has already been decided by the treaties, which rule out any control of capital movements even across the external borders of the EU itself.

In the politics of a rapidly modernising capitalist society, while progress may be sought through Schumpeterian creative destruction of modes of production and ways of life, tradition may call for paternalistic protection and socialistic solidarity. This may cause a recombination of the factions of the sunken party systems of the postwar era: capitalist modernisers and the former working class, who now make up a new, often green middle class, on the one hand, and the old working class, the new precariat and cultural protectionists suspicious of modernisation, on the other. Bringing about this realignment may appear easier than it really is. Merkels technopopulism was a front behind which she tried to build a political bloc in which a renewed conservative party would play a dominant role a conservatism capable of getting a new bourgeois progressivism to join it around a policy of, as Merkel once put it, market-conforming democracy. But this required credible ideological content, which didnt materialise, presumably because a marriage of conservatism, turbocapitalism and democracy is so difficult to conceive.

In a growing number of countries, the resulting political void is increasingly filled by a new left, which disguises its own problem of coalition-building between economic globalism and national social protection behind public soul-searching for moral deficiencies in a permanent cultural revolution. The public sphere of capitalist democracies today tends to be moralised in a way that obstructs the formation of collective interests, which are replaced by safe symbolic spaces for self-defined rights-bearing minorities. Radical politics becomes reduced to struggles, often adjudicated by the courts, by ever smaller groups for control over their symbolic representation. Instead of coalition-building and majority-formation, postmodern politics of this sort gives rise to social fragmentation.

Merkels project of building a new conservative-progressive centre for German politics that would politically neutralise the class-conflicted core of capitalist society was always bound to fail. More than anything else, it failed because she was unable to keep the right the reactionary answer to turbocapitalist modernisation on her side, as she lost up to 10 per cent of the electorate to the AfD, a party she had to declare untouchable in order to keep her constituency together. But all her new political formula had to offer was technical competence, the appearance of Sachlichkeit vested in her as a person. It wasnt enough.

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Wolfgang Streeck In the Superstate: What is technopopulism? LRB 27 January 2022 - London Review of Books

Heres a piece from The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in which Parag Khanna, one of the worlds top experts on migration, says that Scotlands future is Asian. Excerpts:

Europe should view mass migration not just as a benefit but a lifeline, Khanna believes. The Wests entire discussion around migration is cock-eyed, he feels. We have low birth rates, ageing populations, not enough workers especially to care for our growing elderly populations and plenty of space. Europe should be competing in a cut-throat manner to recruit as many smart Asians as possible.

Instead, Europe has seen the rise of anti-immigrant nationalist and populist politics. You cannot simultaneously hold that labour shortages are becoming more acute and also hold that populism remains an immutable force because the truth is that the more painful the demographic and therefore fiscal circumstances become, the more likely it is that populism will have to bend to economic realities, Khanna says.

We tend to default towards this view that national identity and anti-immigration postures are the persistent norm and everything will have to hold and wait until a Great Enlightenment transpires. Thats not at all the case. If that were true Germany wouldnt be the mass-migration country it is today.

Around one million migrants arrive in Germany each year, and 13.7 million people are first-generation migrants. Recent elections saw Germany swing to the left with an SPD-Green-Liberal coalition, and the collapse of the hard-right anti-migrant AfD. That proves, says Khanna, that populism is more bark than bite.

In fact, says Khanna, populism is complete bull****. Italy, he points out, has more migrants than when Matteo Salvini [the right-wing anti-migrant populist leader] was at the peak of his powers. Khanna notes that after Brexit, demographics and worker shortages now mean its factually easier to migrate to Britain as a young Asian than it was five years ago and right under Trumps nose, America became more diverse, more mixed race. We should really view populism for the political blip it is.

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Western democracies need to change their policies for pragmatic, rational and self-interested reasons. If the West continues to adopt anti-immigrant policies, despite the economic and demographic pressures, migrants will still come anyway, only in an uncontrolled, dangerous manner, as weve seen in the English channel. Economics and demographics mean eventually Britain is going to wind up reverting to pro-immigration norms. Canada, with its liberal policies, says more about the future of the West than Hungary does.

The media has skewed the conversation on migration, Khanna believes: concentrating more on bogeymen like Hungarys authoritarian populist Viktor Orban than Canadas liberal Justin Trudeau.

Focusing on Orban flies in the face of the nature of reality. Says Khanna: Canada absorbs more people in a few years than the entire population of Hungary; Orban is on his way out, and nobody wants to go to Hungary anyway. We put all this attention on a peripheral loser rather than the greatest mass-migration story of the 21st century: Canada. Shame on us for that. We do ourselves a great disservice.

This is key:

In Singapore, where theres practically one Filipino care-giver for every old person, neglect of the elderly would be scandalous. Old people are treated with the kind of dignity [the West] can only dream about. Clearly, though, Singapore is far from a free, democratic society.

With demographic destiny staring the West in face, Europeans, says Khanna, should actually be the most pro-immigrant people in the world. You should want your parents to have a Filipino nurse in Dresden so you can in good conscience go and be a millennial living in Berlin.

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St. Theresa of Calcutta once said, about abortion: It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

We could say: It is a poverty to decide that a culture and civilization must die so that you may in good conscience go and be a millennial living in Berlin.

The reader who sent me that interview from Scotland said that its like The Camp of the Saints, except the immigrant invasion is portrayed as a good thing. Hes right about that. Youll recall that The Camp of the Saints is that dystopian French novel from 1973 depicting a mass invasion of France by Third World migrants, who are welcomed by the French establishment, and resisted with violence by a handful of French normies. It is routinely denounced as racist and in fact, it is racist. Back in 2015, I read the book, and said that it is, in fact, racist, repugnantly so. Yet it also tells some important truths. Excerpt from that post:

The Camp of the Saintsis a bad book, both aesthetically and morally. I was ambivalent about its moral status in the early parts of the book. I thought Raspail expressed himself more crudely than I would have done, but his cultural diagnosis struck me as having more merit than I anticipated, given the books notorious reputation. In the novel, a million-man armada of the wretched of the earth decide to sail to Europe from India, more or less daring the West to stop their migration. Most of the narrative focuses on how France prepares itself for the invasion.

Raspail, a traditionalist Catholic and far-rightist, draws in broad strokes a portrait of a France that has given up. All the countrys institutions and leaders across the board decide that it is the moral duty of all Frenchmen to welcome the armada with open arms. Raspail is at his satirical best mocking the sentimental liberal humanitarianism of the political, media, and clerical classes, all of whom look to the armada as a form of salvation, of redemption for the Wests sins. As I wrote here the other day, the scenario reminds me of the exhausted civilization in Cavafys poem Waiting For the Barbarians. A couple of years ago, Cavafy translatorDaniel Mendelsohn wrote inThe New Yorkerabout the poem and the poets political vision(Mendelsohns translation of the poem is in the article). Excerpt:

Cultural exhaustion, political inertia, the perverse yearning for some violent crisis that might break the deadlock and reinvigorate the state: these themes, so familiar to us right now, were favorites of Cavafy. He was, after all, a citizen of Alexandria, a city that had been an emblem of cultural supremacyfounded by Alexander the Great, seat of the Ptolemies, the literary and intellectual center of the Mediterranean for centuriesand which had devolved to irrelevancy by the time he was born, in 1863. When youve seen that much history spool by, that much glory and that much decline, you have very few expectations of historywhich is to say, of human nature and political will.

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The cardinal sins in Cavafys vision of history and politics are complacency, smugness, and a solipsistic inability to see the big picture. What he did admire, extravagantly, were political figures who do the right thing even though they know they have little chance of prevailing: the great losers of history, admirable in their fruitless commitment to ethical behavioror merely sensible enough to know when the game is up.

Raspail blames Frances elites for this too, with reference to the problem of multiculturalism and migration. He even waylays the fictional pope, Benedict XVI (remember, the book was written in 1973), a Latin American (Brazilian) who sells all the treasures of the Vatican to give to the Third World poor, and who exhorts Europe to thrown open its doors to the migrant horde.

The reader who sent me the Herald piece puts his finger on a fundamental and fundamentally dishonest and manipulative aspect of contemporary dialogue with the Left, and with globalist elites (some of whom are right-wing liberals): that they hold the truth of a claim to be dependent on who is making it, and why. If you are Jean Raspail talking about how Third World migrants are going to overwhelm a European country and fundamentally transform it by replacing the native population, and you believe this is a bad thing, then you are a bigot who deserves to be silence and exiled for making up alarmist, racist myths. If, however, you are Parag Khanna talking about the same thing, but you construe it as a good thing, then you are a hero and a prophet who foresees the glorious future.

Its a version of the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

The grungy lower-middle-class suburb I grew up in was an amalgam of various non-Protestant European-derived white folks (Poles, Italians, Czechs, etc.) and a large African American population. It was a fun mix. By 1980, some of us had families that went back two, three, even four generations. Some of the black families went back even longer than that. Over the course of the 20th century, we had a sense of place.

Then came massive immigration. Im 52 years old. I go back to where I grew upI cant really call it homeand everything has been utterly changed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants. The area is unrecognizable. White people have been replaced, and so have many of the black people. I dont begrudge the newcomers their desire for a better life or their obvious industriousness, butmost traces that my people and my culture were ever there is gone. Its depressing and unnecessarily divisive, and it sends a bad message to younger Americans of any race or ethnicity: Why have kids, plan for the future, and try to leave anything for posterity when theres inevitably no sense of a shared culture worth perpetuating, not a trace of anything that will outlive us and resonate in the world, just lots of people having economic transactions with each other who will be replaced by other people who have economic transactions with each other?

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Willie, Nay. Apu, Aye - The American Conservative

Before the anti-vaccine mandate protesters on Sunday marched across the National Mall, event organizers prepared for their arrival at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A row of inspirational photos of anti-vax activists was unfurled at the bottom of the steps pictures of an African-American family, an older Latina woman, a Native American man, an Orthodox Jewish couple, a woman of Asian descent among others.

In a movement associated with the far-right, where its leaders liken vaccine passports to full-blown totalitarianism, and at a demonstration where the mostly white speakers declared themselves not woke but awake, the organizers had clearly gone out of their way to also try to present a welcoming, inclusive context. In posters and in speeches, they co-opted the language of diversity to give the impression of appealing to a wide audience and the appearance of embracing mainstream values.

It was hardly the sole instance of cognitive dissonance at the demonstration. Conservative YouTube comedian JP Sears got the ball rolling, telling the thousands of protesters We didnt come here to agree with each other.

The crowd roared in agreement. The short, balding man in front of me turned to the tall, balding man next to him and said, Exactly.

There to denounce government vaccination mandates (and Big Pharma, the medical establishment, school closures, Bill Gates, fascism, CNN and surveillance) and champion truth and freedom (and vitamin D supplements, ivermectin, dissident doctors, parental choice and Joe Rogan), Sears and subsequent speakers repeatedly cited Martin Luther King Jr. as inspiration. Reminding the protestors that he had given his I have a dream speech on the same steps 58 years ago, King, said Sears, wasnt a mandate kind of guy. He knew you cant comply your way out of tyranny.

But behind their abuse of language and their warping of science in support of their unscientific arguments, the organizers had identified correct currents of concern: authoritarianism, surveillance, loss of privacy, digital tools of social control, experts selling the public a false bill of goods. These are legitimate sources of dread, potential threats to everybodys liberty and freedoms. They are topics deserving scrutiny.

But by putting these issues in service of their right-wing populism and viral disinformation, it begs the question whether any of the anti-mandate crowd speakers and protesters actually care about these things in the first place. Hours into the event, when all the soaring language of liberty and freedom faded and muted by repetition, what was left were true motives: influence, power, attention, and profits from selling useless medical remedies.

Organizers had been adamant that this was a demonstration against government vaccination mandates, not an anti-vax event. That party line fell away when the speakers took to the podium but it had been a crucial messaging tactic. Instead of getting deplatformed by social media companies for propagating vaccine disinformation, organizers quickly amassed tens of thousands of followers on their anti-mandate Facebook pages, galvanizing people to travel to DC from across the country.

But from the start of the demonstration or the show, as JP Sears described the rally vaccination hostility shared center stage with an anti-mandate agenda. The event headliner, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (son of Senator Robert Kennedy), warned of a coming apocalypse stemming from vaccinations and mandates. Even under the Nazis, he said, his voice shaking, Anne Frank was able to hide. But those seeking relief from vaccine tyranny will have nowhere to go. Another key figure behind the march, Robert Malone, a virologist and immunologist, peddled misinformation, fake cures, and compared the United States to a psychotic society similar to Nazi Germany.

At the March: Anti-mandate firefighters local media reported 200 DC firefighters attended around a giant flag they had carried horizontally from the Washington Monument; different groups of protestors giving interviews in Spanish; the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, mingling in the crowd.

Demonstrators and reporters lined up to take photos of a man with a white, wispy chin-beard, dressed head-to-toe as Uncle Sam with a giant syringe around his head. One man in his early 20s wore a Guy Fawkes mask; another man stood on stilts in a grim reaper costume, his sign warning of the deadly consequences of In Pfizer we trust.

While the crowd thronged the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, around the edges, small groups held placards and commented on the proceedings with bullhorns, like an unhinged Greek chorus. One gaggle of people stood on the sidewalk, incessantly correcting the speakers that Christ is who matters here. We need to remember what Lincoln stood for, said a speaker. You need to remember what Jesus stood for, a member of the sidewalk group answered. This went on for about 30 minutes when, as three Hasidic Jews walked toward the Lincoln Monument, the group told them through the bullhorn to get right with Jesus you dirty Jews.

Another scraggly group on the sidelines chanted Darwin wins as protesters passed. At first, I took them as counter-protesters, an anti-anti-mandate carve-out. But apparently, no: they were anti-vax and anti-mandate, and felt Darwin was on their side. The data shows otherwise: Although Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness decreased with emergence of the Delta variant and waning of vaccine-induced immunity, protection against hospitalization and death has remained high.

Many of the protesters had drawn similar conclusions. Science is on their side. Speakers invoked Albert Einstein and Saint Augustine. While one particularly intricately drawn sign proclaimed I trust and follow my intuition & instincts discerning what is fight & true for me, most of the others begged the world to follow the data. Echoing the science is real lawn signs in front of progressive U.S. households, the rally signs urged people to believe in credentialed experts, but only the vanishingly small minority of medical experts who condemned vaccines and are unfairly persecuted by their colleagues, and realize, as one sign read, Galileo also was accused of spreading misinformation.

The pre-rally messaging of a solely anti-mandate agenda, instead of anti-vaccination, allowed organizers to focus on what they argued is the true peril facing the world: the loss of liberty and freedom to digital vaccine passports, coerced vaccine shots, and medical surveillance. Speakers cited the Chinese social credit tracking system, surveillance phone apps, and Chinas one child policy, which was rescinded in 2015. Protesters signs echoed the same concerns.

Much of that isnt viewed as over the top by millions of Americans, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. While about 75% of Americans eligible for the vaccine have taken at least one shot, conspiracies centering vaccinations, government mandates, and disinformation are on the rise. Since January 2020, the 153 most influential anti-vaccine social media accounts have gained 2.9 million new followers.

The number of protesters who showed up for the demonstration was far less than the 20,000 promised by the organizers. But in promoting he message of diversity and multiculturalism while simultaneously denouncing woke culture, in claiming to defend science while simultaneously contradicting it, in condemning authoritarianism, surveillance, and the theft of privacy while promoting right-wing populism and a conspiracy worldview that allows for these things to prosper, the organizers have struck a chord. Its dissonant, but it works. The next march will be bigger.

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Protesters embraced the cognitive dissonance of claiming to own science while basking in conspiracies and fanciful theories - Coda Story

Covid-19 is at once a health crisis, an economic crisis, a political crisis, a cultural crisis, a moral crisis, and a global crisis with no end to the crises in sight.

Since the 1980s, the hegemony of neoliberalism has generated a social crisis characterised by strong inequalities, in particular the growing inequality between capital and labour. More and more areas of society have been subjected to the logic of commodification and profit. The 9/11 attacks set in motion a political crisis characterised by a vicious circle of terror and war. In 2008, the financialisation of the economy resulted in a global economic crisis.

In the years that followed, authoritarian and nationalist movements, parties, and politicians became increasingly successful, leading to a crisis of democracy and the spread of post-factual politics. It comes as no surprise that in the wake of all these crises, a significant number of people have become susceptible to conspiracy theories, populism, demagoguery, and fake news.

The correct and important antidote to these developments is a renewal of social democracy in the 21st century and the liberation of society from neoliberalism. Todays societies urgently need a restoration of the welfare state, higher taxation of capital, and a politics of redistribution that benefits primarily working people with low and middle incomes. Of course, even in post-neoliberal societies with a strong welfare state and few inequalities and injustices, there will be conspiracy theories. But these will most likely be less strong and less militant.

In my study on the spread of Covid-19 conspiracy theories on social media, I analysed materials and comments from the internet. The study underlines that Covid-19 conspiracy theories often rely on a clear distinction between friend and foe and present Bill Gates in particular as an enemy. A crude economism is used in the discourse: Every possible action of individuals like Bill Gates is reduced to the profit motive, a personalising critique of capitalism.

We lack time for deep political debates on the internet, further fuelling echo chambers, polarisation, and the colonisation of the public sphere by commerce and ideology.

However, billionaires like Bill Gates are so rich they can afford and want philanthropy that actually reduces their wealth. What follows is therefore an ineffectual attempt at rationalisation by claiming that everything Bill Gates does is necessarily evil. His actions are necessarily always motivated by the interest and plan to accumulate capital and power because he is a billionaire and the founder of a monopoly corporation. There are no coincidences in this worldview; everything is considered the result of a secret plan by an elite.

There is no panacea against conspiracy theories: neither moral appeals nor legislation will suffice. The fundamental problem is that todays societies are highly polarised politically and the public sphere is fragmented by echo chambers and post-factual politics where people are not guided by facts but by ideology and emotions. The distinction between friend and foe, which turns individuals into scapegoats, is not only found in conspiracy theories, but in everyday media and political discourse.

The tabloidisation of media and politics plays a significant role here. Tabloids, conspiracy theories, and demagogy are driven by the logic of resentment, one-sidedness, and gut feelings.

The internet platforms through which conspiracy theories and ideologies are primarily disseminated belong to global corporations that are beholden to their owners profit interests. They have contributed to a kind of digital fast-food media culture that thrives on fast, short-lived, superficial, and advertising-saturated snippets of opinion and information. We lack time for deep political debates on the internet, further fuelling echo chambers, polarisation, and the colonisation of the public sphere by commerce and ideology.

The challenge, then, is to strengthen democracy and the democratic public sphere while expanding and developing the welfare state as part of a post-neoliberal turn. Public media have, on the one hand, been very popular in the pandemic as sources of information and education. On the other hand, their existence and the admissibility of broadcasting fees are repeatedly questioned by their opponents, especially by the right. For instance, in order to steer attention away from his own scandals (Partygate), British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced that he would abolish the licence fee, which would inevitably lead to the break-up of the BBC.

In the media landscape, Europes greatest strength is the tradition of public broadcasters.

To strengthen the public sphere and save democracy, we need more public service media not less. The Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto calls for securing the existence, funding, and independence of public service media and the creation of a public service internet. This includes internet platforms as well as associated formats and services operated by public service media. This manifesto is already supported by over 1,000 individuals and organisations, including Jrgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky, and the International Federation of Journalists.

For instance, the public broadcasters ARD, ZDF, BBC, and France Tlvisions have jointly organised a public service internet platform modelled on YouTube, where new debate, information, education, culture and entertainment formats are realised with user participation. Public service media, unlike the digital giants such as YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, and many more, have a public mandate that promotes high-quality services and formats.

Scandals like the Cambridge Analytica controversy have shown that the Big Tech giants focus on profit maximisation poses a real threat to democracy. Donald Trump, Facebook, and Twitter have all profited from each other: one politically and ideologically, the other financially. European media and digital policy has tried for too long to imitate the innovations of Silicon Valley. This strategy has failed. There is no European Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon.

In the media landscape, Europes greatest strength is the tradition of public broadcasters. These should not be undermined, but strengthened, expanded, and made fit for the digital age. Saving democracy needs public service media and a public service internet.

Conspiracy theories, fake news, online hatred, post-factuality, and political polarisation are expressions of the overflow of economic, social, political, and cultural crises and social contradictions. There are no simple recipes against these developments. To strengthen democracy, we need a paradigm shift away from the tabloidisation, commercialisation, and acceleration of media and communication towards the creation of a new (digital) public sphere. This requires a media and digital policy transformation and a digital-democratic structural change of the public sphere.

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During the pandemic, conspiracy theories have run rampant. Europe needs to counter it with a public service internet Work and digitalisation - IPS...

Possibly because the notion of Critical Race Theory is so vague to most conservative voters, when Republican Glenn Youngkin, then-candidate for Virginia governor, ran for office, he labeled himself as the parents rights candidate by attempting further to instill fear on the part of the white electorate.

He raised his racist bullhorn by declaring not only his intent to ban Critical Race Theory the day he is elected but also to outlaw the reading of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel by author Toni Morrison, Beloved, which was turned into a major feature film.

Related: 64 things Joe Biden has done for the LGBTQ community during his first year in office

Beloved, a truthful and painful story of the lives and loves of two enslaved black people in the U.S. South, has become an integral part of the cannon of not only African American literature but of U.S.-American literature generally.

After winning the Virginia gubernatorial election and with the support of the Virginia state legislature, new bills to limit the teaching of our countrys true past have circulated throughout the Virginia statehouse.

House bill No. 781, proposed by Republican Delegate Wren Williams, prohibits divisive concepts from instruction in Virginia public elementary and secondary schools.While Williams made clear his opposition to the teaching of Critical Race Theory, the wording divisive concepts in its vagueness closes the door on the teaching of anything and everything conservatives deem appropriate and necessary to ban.

In the wording of the bill, Virginias social studies curriculum will be standardized (a.k.a. controlled and regimented) and educators will teach about, founding documents of the United States, like the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Even Virginias elementary and secondary school students, I would hope, know so much more than the legislators attempting to enact severe constraints on curriculum and pedagogy throughout their systems of education.

By the 5th grade, students should have learned about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in Illinois between incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Lincoln, his Republican challenger in the race for U.S. senator. The major topic during the series of seven debates included the candidates views on whether new states joining the union would permit or prohibit slavery within their borders.

In Youngkins inauguration speech on Saturday, January 15, 2022, he seemed to talk from both sides of his mouth when he promised,We will remove politics from the classroom and re-focus on essential math, science and reading. And we will teach all of our history the good and the bad.

Then within an hour following his speech, he immediately signed 11 executive orders including lifting the mask mandate for Virginia schools and ending the vaccine mandate for state employees in a school system and state with increasingly rising infection rates.

Wanting to be known as The Education Governor, one of his executive orders ends the use of divisive concepts in schools such as Critical Race Theory, which is not currently part of the curriculum.

One day later in an interview on Fox, Youngkin doubled down on his misunderstanding, the perpetuation of misinformation, and yes, the politicization of the teaching of the legacy of racism and race relations in the United States.

We are not going to teach the children to view everything through a lens of race. Yes, we will teach all history, the good and the bad. Because we cant know where were going unless we know where we have come from. But to actually teach our children that one group is advantaged and the other disadvantaged because of the color of skin, cuts everything we know to be true.

So, whom does Youngkin designate as we in everything we know to be true?

The Virginia governor and state legislature pose a great and common example clearly demonstrating why politicians cannot and must not dictate the parameters of what educators teach in the schools throughout the nation.

Professor and Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton, Shelley Inglis, studies authoritarian leaders around the world and came up with a list of ten common markers characteristic to many.

One maker states that authoritarians appeal to populism and nationalism. While populism encompasses a range of political stances emphasizing the idea of siding with the people against the so-called elite and can exist on the political left, the right, or the center, right-wing populism co-opts the term and juxtaposes nationalist and nativist aims. This form of populism we have clearly witnessed during this era of Trumpism.

Another of Inglis markers of authoritarianism is the control of information at home (propaganda and stifling of truth in schools, the media, and the larger society) and misinformation abroad.

Though Youngkin is but a petty autocrat in one state, his influence has become immense since winning the Virginia statehouse. The larger Republican Party is taking several pages from his political playbook by first, straddling the line between embracing Trumps brand of populism while keeping a certain distance from the twice impeached failed president.

Secondly, they have implemented Youngkins successful tactic of scaring parents and other community members with the false flag of Critical Race Theory by banning age-appropriate truthful education of young people to the realities of our history.

While Youngkin promised to allow the teaching of our history, the good and the bad, the schools will continue to teach a watered-down whitewashed version of what students need to know to help our country come to terms with and begin to heal from the violations to human and civil rights of the past.

Before Youngkin won his election and continuing to the present day, since January 2021, Education Week has found that 32 states have either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Thirteen states have already inflicted these restrictions.

Just think about it: States are passing laws and enacting executive orders banning the teaching of how the states passed laws banning the teaching of enslaved peoples under the apartheid system of U.S.-American slavery.

They are passing laws and enacting executive orders banning the teaching of how the states passed laws banning voting rights of people of color.

These very laws and executive order banning the teaching of the true legacy of race confirms one of the primary characteristics of Critical Race Theory: that racism is a permanent feature of the U.S. political and social system.

These laws challenge any reality, any truth that contradicts the pablum we are fed as young people of the nationalist narrative that this country functions as a meritocracy: that the individual succeeds or fails based chiefly on their merit, from their motivation, abilities, values, ambition, commitment, and persistence, rather than on their backgrounds or social identities.

Autocrats have a vested stake in withholding the true accounting of our past.

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Glenn Youngkin wants to be the Education Governor but he doesn't want schools to teach the truth - LGBTQ Nation