Reckoning with ‘populism at its worst’ | Surveying the Views … – boulder-monitor.com

I recently attended a talk on Democracy at the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana featuring former congresswoman Liz Cheney and former governor Marc Racicot. Despite the self-inflicted chaos and commotion infecting our nation, their overall message was encouraging. Both speakers thought our country will be able to survive these times of conflict and controversy. However, they added that in order for our Democratic Republic to endure, all of us need to play a part in countering those who would tear down our institutions, move us away from Democracy and toward autocracy. Trump and Trumpism was pretty much the theme, and target for the evening.

Trumpism is populism at its worst. It uses misinformation, false claims of a rigged election, violence and threats of violence to achieve political goals. Over 60 court decisions rejected these rigged election allegations including a decision by SCOTUS. The sad part is those in Congress who are promoting these distortions in order to obtain votes dont believe their own fabrications. Cheney stated that about 99% of Congressional Republicans who promote false and deceptive propaganda flatly reject their own political lies, off the record. She acknowledged that there are a few Republican members of Congress who actually believe the big lies that they are preaching, including one member of Montanas congressional delegation.

As for myself, I do my best to sort misinformation from fact. It is not easy due to deceptive social media tactics rife with half-truths. I dont make decisions or form and express opinions based on gossip, rumors, guesswork or conjecture. I refuse to jump on the fantasyland band wagon which is eroding democratic values. I embrace democracy and reject Trumpism.

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Reckoning with 'populism at its worst' | Surveying the Views ... - boulder-monitor.com

Is it Ireland’s turn to ward off a toxic populism? – America: The Jesuit Review

The Irish parliament, the Dil, met for the first day of a new session in September. In scenes that shocked many, the returning members were met by an angry and violent crowd of protestors. Several demonstrators threw up a homemade gallows featuring portraits of various political and civil society figures.

One politician was accostedand, it appears from video footage, almost assaulted. And a protest blockade kept people trapped inside the building long after the session had ended.

According to The Irish Times, the protest was organized over social media, where it was dubbed Call to the Dil, drawing participants from far-right groups and individuals nurturing a host of grievances and anxieties about contemporary Irish society, from Covid-19 conspiracies to immigration and transgender issues, housing shortages and the economy.

No single policy or party was the target of the protest, The Irish Times reported, with politicians across the political spectrum depicted on posters describing them as globalist traitors.

Ireland has long been understood as one of the few European nations that has not become home to a populist or far-right movement. But Irish society has changed dramatically in the last generation.

While the truth is more complex than any shorthand account, many Irish people would describe that change as a move from a conservative culture haunted by a dysfunctional religiosity to a liberated, educated and affluent society that aspires to welcome everyone. The scenes outside the Dil, which evoked in their own way the infamous attack on the capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, alarmed many committed to that liberalizing project.

A nation long known for producing immigrants has been experiencing higher rates of immigration most years since the late 1980s. Immigrant numbers spiked to 121,000 in 2022, a 15-year high, that included almost 30,000 refugees from Ukraine. Many of the Dil protesters organized through social media hashtags like #irelandbelongstotheirish, suggesting that those increasing numbers of immigrants were the source of their discontent.

Marc Cathasaigh is a T.D. (a teachta dla, a member of Parliament) for the Green Party. He was present at the Dil and was shaken by the rage expressed among the demonstrators. At the same time, he insists it is important to be careful not to exaggerate. The crowds were objectively small, he says. This wasnt the fall of the rule of law in Ireland.

But neither does he want to underestimate the nations growing far right. It has been a common strategy across Europe for fascist parties to piggyback on a patchwork of different complaints, then to coalesce around a particular issue, frequently immigration, into a coherent political movement. They key into different issues which motivate and radicalize people. They look for a wedge issue, he says.

He has noted a definite change in the tone of the debate in Ireland, as the pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it accelerated fragmentation and polarizationwith an able assist from social media echo chambers. Opportunities to respectfully debate ideas in Irish society are diminishing, he worries.

Mr. Cathasaigh cites a lecture he recently attended by Stella Creasy, a member of the U.K. Parliament for the Labour Party, who suggested that in the aftermath of the tragedy and upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic the politics of ideas has been overtaken by the politics of anger.

Even if we do not have a shorthand label to describe the kind of political movement represented at the Dail protest, Mr. Cathasaigh says that it is clearly unified by disenfranchisement and anger.

He argues that when political discourse primarily takes place online, citizens end up having poorer conversations about pressing issues. Part of the problem are the negative feedback loops implemented in social media algorithms; part of it is the disembodied nature of the beast.

Mr. Cathasaigh recalls that Pope Francis often focuses on the importance of human encounter. The encounter with an individual is something we have really lost as we moved online, he says. The interaction is mediated. A screen stands between us and them. This makes empathy and mutual understanding harder to achieve, leading to mere argument, never dialogue, because of the insider/outsider dynamic.

Mr. Cathasaigh does not present himself as someone who has all the answers. Indeed, it seems one way to frame his concerns is that Irish culture is losing its capacity to even ask good questions.

Some have suggested that the response to these increasingly threatening protests should include rendering any protest outside the Parliament impossible. A more productive approach, Mr. Cathasaigh believes, may be to find ways to relocate power in the hands of citizens. The Irish political system is very centralized in the capital city, Dublin; Irish local governments are among the worst-funded in Europe.

Having government functions so centralized has a dual effect, explains Mr. Cathasaigh: It is disempowering for the citizen and it leaves very little room for thinking for the [member of parliament]. The reality is that much of a T.D.s time is taken up remedying issues that could be more effectively handled at a regional level.

By consciously moving decision-making power closer to the people, much of the feeling of powerlessness evident among the protesters could be remedied, he says.

Mr. Cathasaigh proposes that some form of participatory budgets could be introduced, creating a context where the money spent in a region is more responsive to the views and wisdom of those who know the place best. Instead of an opaque bureaucracy making decisions, citizens would have the chance to thrash out the practical realities of how to build a better society.

With no screen or algorithm mediating the encounter and having been drawn together by what we might describe as, adapting words of the theologian Oliver ODonovan, the loves we share in common, such an approach might generate empathy instead of enmity. This subsidiary approach, suggesting a foundational component of Catholic social teaching, would be one that grounds people.

The Irish State already has a prominent form of deliberative consultation known as citizens assemblies. These are conversations about matters of significance that might require new legislation or policy, conducted by 99 representative citizens chosen at random, which are informed by a range of expert opinion.

But as the prominent Irish Jesuit Edmond Grace explains, the assemblies tend to address issues at such a high level that they do not remedy this sense of disconnect between the average person and the decisions being made in his or her name.

If you take the biodiversity citizens assemblyit came to over 159 recommendations, he says. When the conversation is that diffuse, the functioning reality is that the ruling party receives the recommendations and uses them as a license to act on the issues they had already identified as priorities, ignoring the others.

After decades working in Ireland and at the European Union on building democratic institutions, Father Grace agrees with Mr. Cathasaigh that one direct way to head off the threat of rising populist movements is to generate new modes of participative engagement. His suggestionbecoming more popular across the continentis the establishment of citizens juries (often called citizens panels in a European context).

A citizens jury, is, like a citizens assembly, designed to bring together groups of people from different sectors of society, different genders, ages, geographies, socioeconomic backgrounds. And just like the assemblies, they are designed to bring them into contact directly with people in power.

What Father Grace proposes is no longer a fringe idea. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, called for such mechanisms to become a regular feature of our democratic life in last years State of the Union address.

The juries do not replace their national parliaments, which would still debate and pass legislation. They do not intrude on the responsibility of political representatives to determine policy. But they do promise to put the deliberation about how those policies are enacted back into the hands of the people directly affected.

Many of the protestors who assailed the Dil were concerned about the lack of services and infrastructure in their regions. Typically, for example, their anti-migrant rhetoric is framed in terms of how this influx will put massive pressure on an already stretched system. In that situation, Father Grace explains, when a set of projects have been identified by the national government, it would be for the jury to decide where in their county these things will go.

The topics that together generated the fury outside the Dilmigration, changing understanding of gender, the limits of public health interventionsmight remain contentious.

But there is hope that these experiments in more deliberative, participatory government might dissipate the politics of anger and head off the risk of populism by restoring a sense that power still resides with the people.

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Is it Ireland's turn to ward off a toxic populism? - America: The Jesuit Review

Right-Wing Populism May Rise in the U.S. – WSJ

William A. Galston writes the weekly Politics & Ideas column in the Wall Street Journal. He holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institutions Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. Before joining Brookings in January 2006, he was Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Mr. Galston is the author of 10 books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018). A winner of the American Political Science Associations Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

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Right-Wing Populism May Rise in the U.S. - WSJ

The pandemic of populism – The News International

Today is a very important day for Pakistan. Not because of the defeat of a single party or success of another. It is important because of the temporary defeat of populism, fascism and demagoguery which shows that it can be defeated in the long run too. it is important because of the success of constitution, democratic process and rule of law bringing hope that these can succeed in the long run too.

Watching the sudden spread of sentimental slogans in the political arena and their vast appeal among the youth has been very alarming. Witnessing that in this age of reason and transparency, how easy it is to sell the narrative of conspiracy and subterfuge has been very disappointing. It has been alarming to see that even in the age of information and digital revolution, people can easily be made to overlook bad governance, economic incompetence and violation of democratic norms, with a bit of conspiracy theories and slogans.

Tapping into the inherent grievances and sentiments of masses through rhetoric and slogans is not only easy but very powerful. Innocent people can be rallied behind slogans and sentiments using the propaganda techniques of repetition and lying with confidence even if these sentiments are self-contradictory and devoid of any truth and substance.

Slogans and rhetoric sell more easily and widely than substance and facts. Fiction is believable more than facts. Sensation is stronger than truthful details. Appearing patriotic is more important than being patriotic. The image of being religious is more appealing than actually becoming religious. Optics matter more than reality.

It is a shocker to see that even today in the 21st Century, how an autocratic and self serving ruler can rule by the play book of Niccolo Machiaveli's The Prince of 16th century. Mass manipulation and propaganda still works. Patriotism and nationalism can still be used as tools to divided and move the masses.

Today, the Trumpian Populists all over the world have tapped into the anger and ignorance of youth and have directed their energy and aggression for their own political gains. It is Joseph Goebbels' Germany all over again.

This pandemic of populism turning fast into fascism will not die on its own. The mass appeal of xenophobic Conspiracy theories cannot be fought just through governance and economic development. It needs a strong, proactive and penetrative counter narrative.

This is the era of post truth where every group has its own echo chamber and lives by its own truths. The myths of popular leaders like IK, Modi and Trump need to be busted. They have normalised conspiracies, xenophobia, hate politics and extremism, racism and misogyny. This disease will not end unless met and countered with strong and wilful response.

It is time for the resurgence of Democratic norms and values. It is time to highlight the importance of conservatism over revolution. Only evolution in a stable environment can bring the real and lasting change.

People need to be educated so that they're able to distinguish facts from fiction. They need to be trained so that they can see through the lies and hypocrisy of populist leaders. They need to be taught of the importance of constitution, due process, rule of law for their own sake, their own rights and protections, their own liberties and freedoms. The importance of deciphering complex political phenomenons into simple, understandable and easily digestible information is important, now more than ever. Guiding the youth towards substance and away from superficiality is crucial. It is vital that youth knows that a country cannot be strong without a strong economy, that economy is not run with aggressive slogans, that governance is not possible through optics, that foreign diplomacy is not done through speeches. They need to know that democracy, governance and economic development is a long and arduous process which needs consistency, concerted effort, and perseverance. They need to know that strong system and institutions are more important than powerful personalities.

A wise man said, " save the nation which looks for heroes."

It needs to be taught that for democracy to function smoothly and develop into a mature and effective governance system, it needs consistency, free and fair elections, public participation and positive involvement of all democratic forces.

Countries where democracy and its corresponding values are flourishing fall in the category of low context cultures. In countries like UK, USA and Scandinavian cultures, masses tend to rely more on direct, straightforward and factual communication. On the other than, in high context cultures like Pakistan, ideologies, slogans and rhetoric find more weight among people. The gradual transformation of Pakistani culture from a high context to a low context culture is important. Promoting and strengthening the democratic values and ensuring that it delivers to people is of paramount importance. Making people beneficiaries of democracy, constitutionalism and rule of law is of critical import to make them respect and value it.

Those who know and can see through this farce have a responsibility. Staying passive and hoping for a positive outcome is not going to work. Indifference and detachment is not an option. Today, it is easier to be just a cog in the machine than to be a visionary and truthsayer. But it is important to voice your opinions critically and take down this house of cards built on deceit and demagoguery.

The preservation of self and nations is done by standing with the principles and norms not slogans and rhetoric.

The writer is a legal practitioner from Lahore. alijilani079@gmail.com

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The pandemic of populism - The News International

Populism and the federal election: what can we expect from Hanson, Palmer, Lambie and Katter? – The Conversation

Populist politicians have been household names in Australian politics over the past decade, from Pauline Hanson to Clive Palmer, Bob Katter and Jacqui Lambie.

They tend to only get a small amount of the popular vote between them, at the last election, they attracted 7% of first preferences in the House of Representatives and 8.32% of the Senate vote. Yet they can play a big role on the Senate crossbench and can get significant concessions regarding their pet issues.

They can also change the tenor of politics in Australia, and the way their preferences fall - or how they spend their advertising dollars - can make or break close electoral races.

But where do these populist parties who all claim to speak for the people against the elite sit as we begin the 2022 federal election?

Pauline Hansons One Nation, Palmers United Australia Party, Katters Australian Party and the Jacqui Lambie Network are all fielding candidates in the upper and lower house elections.

In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, two of these parties have sought to capitalise on anti-vaccination and anti-COVID vaccine mandate sentiments.

The United Australia Party has made this its core - maybe even single - issue. As you have surely seen on those yellow billboards, the party is promising freedom from the COVID restrictions and mandates of the past years. Meanwhile, party leader (and former Liberal MP) Craig Kelly spruiks hydroxychloroquine) and ivermectin as COVID treatments, despite evidence showing theyre not effective.

He is tipped to spend A$70 million on the campaign. In 2019, Palmer spent a record $84 million without winning a seat, but claimed his anti-Shorten ads shifted voters away from Labor.

Read more: 5 ways to spot if someone is trying to mislead you when it comes to science

One Nation has also tried to capitalise on the anti-vaccination movements prominence. While it is pushing its usual anti-immigration talking points, it has supplemented these with anti-mandate messaging, with Hanson and senator Malcolm Roberts appearing at anti-vaccine rallies in Canberra.

The other two populist parties are relying on their regional appeal.

The Jacqui Lambie Network is hoping to extend the former independents appeal more widely across Tasmania. The partys message is all about making life better for the underdog combining an anti-corruption message with campaigns for better healthcare, education and opportunities for young people and workers in Tasmania.

Katters Australian Party, meanwhile, portrays on a division between the people of rural Australia (particularly Far North Queensland) and the distant elite of Canberra and the big cities. As usual, it will be focusing on regional development, agricultural subsidies and ensuring FNQ gets fair treatment.

Coronavirus has markedly shifted the political, social and economic landscape since the last federal election.

Australias closed borders for much of 2020 and 2021 has made the anti-immigration position of One Nation less salient and effective, so it is no wonder they have pivoted to an anti-COVID mandate position to try and extend their appeal.

Read more: Is it curtains for Clive? What COVID means for populism in Australia

Meanwhile, the United Australia Party has completely rebuilt itself around the issue, moving from its almost singularly Stop Bill Shorten message in 2019.

Beyond this, repeated rorts and integrity scandals during the Morrison government have given fuel to populists (as well as numerous independent candidates) to push for more transparency in politics.

Other than Katter, who has held the seat of Kennedy since 1993, it is highly unlikely populist parties are going to have any success in the House of Representatives (despite the United Australia Partys claim Kelly will be the next prime minister).

The Senate is where things will be interesting. The Queensland senate race is the big one for populists, with the two most prominent populist politicians in the country - Hanson and Palmer - running for what will likely be the sixth seat in the state. They also face competition from former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman (running for the Liberal Democrats this time around).

The final seat in some other states will also be worth watching. In Tasmania, the Jacqui Lambie Network is throwing its resources behind the campaign of Tammy Tyrell, their lead Senate candidate. Tyrell is a long-time office manager and advisor to Lambie (who is not up for re-election this time).

The Tasmanian Senate contest could see either see Liberal Eric Abetz, Tyrell, the United Australia Party or newcomers the Local Party take the seat. Theres also a very slim (but possible) chance One Nation or United Australia Party could win the sixth seat in New South Wales and Western Australia.

There are two big questions about populism in 2022.

First, has the political potency of the anti-vaccination/anti-lockdown message passed? As we enter the so-called era of COVID-normal, where restrictions are wound back and lockdowns are supposedly a thing of the past, it is unclear whether the United Australia Party and One Nation have backed the right horse at the right time.

Second, are voters sick of the mainstream parties, or sick of the Morrison government? Populists prosper when there is a widespread sense of political malaise, but time will tell if they want to punish the political class in general, thus leading to a populist upswing, or the Morrison government specifically in which we can expect much of that frustration to filter to a vote for Labor and the teal independents.

Whether this is going to be a good election for populist parties in Australia remains to be seen: stay tuned.

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Populism and the federal election: what can we expect from Hanson, Palmer, Lambie and Katter? - The Conversation

Opinion | To Overcome the Republicans’ Culture War, Democrats Need to Punch Up, Not Down – POLITICO

A study by Way to Win, a network of progressive political donors that I helped start and which has moved over $200 million to grassroots efforts, media, candidates and research since 2018, found that in 2020, congressional Democrats spent three times more than Republicans on television ads touting bipartisanship. By contrast, Republicans went on offense, spending upwards of 10 times more than Democrats on ads with the words extremist and radical. The result? Democrats lost 12 seats in a cycle where they were projected to gain as many as 15. While Democrats handled the GOP with kid gloves, Republicans told a clear story with a clear villain, and it paid off.

The reason the Democratic Party keeps losing is not because some communities are speaking out against the violence they experience at the hands of the police or the immigration system. The reason Democrats lose is because they dont tell an effective story of who they are, what theyre up against and what they are fighting for. Democrats cant ignore the culture war being waged against them. But they need a different way to counter it. Whats needed is an inclusive populism that acknowledges how precarious life has become for far too many, even as those at the top are doing better than ever.

When Republicans go after Democrats as too woke, what theyre really doing is painting the party as too elite. Democrats, the GOP attack goes, are so far removed from the daily concerns of working people that they are more interested in virtue-signaling than kitchen table issues. And indeed, Republicans are hard at work to convey this message because they know its a winning one. Wokeness was cooked up by college professors, then boosted by corporations, states a strategy memo by the Republican Study Committee, which goes on to describe Democrats agenda as shaped entirely by corporate interests and radical, elite cultural mores.

This is cynical but savvy messaging, and it points to a real problem for Democrats. The partys biggest problem is not the effort to pursue racial justice, but the fact that Democrats are seen as and are out of touch with workers and people who are struggling to make ends meet.

Party leaders must confront this elitist image head-on. Instead of continuing down a path where Democrats address themselves to the mythical median voter, as some vocal pundits advise, while doing little to change the material conditions for the millions of Americans who are suffering, the party should embrace an inclusive style of populism that punches up at elites instead of down at activists. That means demanding the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share and the rules of the game get unrigged. Democrats can then emphasize what it is that ties us all together the fight for every individual to live a life with dignity.

This brand of populism appeals both to Democrats base of low wage workers and to many of the voters the party needs to persuade; it can serve as a bridge to grow the coalition. A recent Pew survey finds that 11 percent of the American public can be considered Populist Right, or voters who lean right on social issues but left on economics. Among this group, 75 percent think big corporations make too much profit, while over half think the federal government should raise taxes on households making more than $400,000 per year. This is a broadly popular agenda, and it should be the top priority of the Democratic Party. Some of President Joe Bidens domestic proposals would go a long way toward executing it, but hes been stymied too often by so-called centrists in his own party such as Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

Democrats can use this inclusive populist narrative to respond to voters top issue: inflation. As Lindsay Owens of Groundwork Collaborative has noted, corporate CEOs have repeatedly stated that they are using reports of inflation in some sectors of the economy as an excuse to raise prices on consumer goods. And Americans have an intuitive sense that they are being treated unfairly. According to a recent poll, three-quarters of Democrats and a majority of Republicans believe corporations are opportunistically raising prices under cover of inflation.

Democrats should also focus on issues that deliver concrete benefits to working Americans, and which motivate their voters to show up to the polls. Canceling student debt would disproportionately benefit Americans at the lower end of the economic scale; meanwhile failing to act will likely lead to a fall-off in turnout. According to a recent poll, 40 percent of Black voters and 37 percent of all Democratic voters say they might stay home in 2022 without debt cancellation.

The benefit of keeping the Democratic coalition united behind an inclusive, populist message was made crystal clear in Georgia in 2020. During the Georgia runoffs, where my organization supported grassroots groups such as the New Georgia Project, Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff presented a multiracial, multigenerational duo with a plan to send relief checks to families. Warnock and Ossoff did not shy away from naming villains and tagging their opponents as agents of corporate greed. At one point, Ossoff labeled the two Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption in American politics.

The difference between the way these two Democrats ran compared to many others in the party was noteworthy. Democrats in Georgias high-stakes runoff election Tuesday are doing what their counterparts in other competitive Senate races didnt do: Theyre leaning in to a populist economic message, NBC News reported at the time. Today, Democrats have Warnock and Ossoff to thank for control of the Senate.

If Democrats want to succeed in November, they need to tell a story about how to secure broadly shared prosperity and justice for all. That requires calling out those who are working against this vision for the sake of private profit and personal gain not shunting aside some of the most vulnerable, and loyal, members of the party.

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Opinion | To Overcome the Republicans' Culture War, Democrats Need to Punch Up, Not Down - POLITICO

Saskatchewan Party populism the model to unseat Trudeau Liberals: Brian Lee Crowley in the National Post – Macdonald-Laurier Institute

This article originally appeared in the National Post.

By Brian Lee Crowley, April 13, 2022

Many Conservatives moan about the challenges of being a conservative party in a left-wing country, as if the deck was stacked against them by the electorates immutable progressive beliefs. What if, however, Canada is a country with deeply held but non-ideological beliefs that are in many ways quite conservative but the Conservative Party constantly misjudges how to connect with those values? If this is correct, then Canada is not the problem. The Conservative Party is.

For an object lesson in how to let underlying conservative values shine through an overlay of long-time progressive government, look to Saskatchewan. Long a bastion of CCF and then NDP government, a place progressives elsewhere in Canada longingly admired from afar, Saskatchewan has decisively shed its NDP allegiance. It has transferred its affections instead to the Saskatchewan Party, a relatively populist amalgam of small-c conservative Tories and Liberals.

The CCF/NDP ruled Saskatchewan for roughly 46 of the 63 years between 1944 and 2007, punctuated by short interludes of government by the Liberals or the Tories when the electorate judged the NDP needed a time out. But voters always returned to their NDP home, including in the early days of the Saskatchewan Party. The new party was still young, brash and aggressively populist. Successive electoral defeats ground down the partys sharp edges until, under leader Brad Wall, the party learned how to win the trust of voters while holding firm to conservative principles.

It wasnt that Saskatchewan people werent in their heart of hearts conservative. It was that they worried that an ideologically-driven Saskatchewan Party would throw out the baby with the bathwater.

A major sticking point for Saskatchewan voters was the panoply of Crown corporations that had grown up under the NDP, running everything from telephones to auto insurance. The voters recoiled before the early Saskatchewan Partys determination to rid the province of these affronts to private enterprise.

Saskatchewan folks are more pragmatic. They were fine with conservative incremental adjustment but resistant to radical populist wholesale change. They preferred the known and comfortable to the unknown and theoretical.Brad Walls genius was that he brought a whole different philosophy to presenting conservative-oriented change to Saskatchewan. He didnt start out with hard-line ideology that promised a sharp break with the past, trying to convince people to accept a leap in the dark.

As Dale Eisler, author of an important new book, From Left to Right: Saskatchewans Political and Economic Transformation, argues, the conservative populism expressed by Wall spoke to feelings and values that resonated with the people of Saskatchewan, more Humboldt and Swift Current than Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

He would often deliver his message in terms of Saskatchewan values, things like self-reliance, hard work, resilience, entrepreneurship, dedication and a sense of community. He understood that you appeal to people, not with partisan political rhetoric, but beliefs and attributes the majority of people share. He would always root his policy decisions in those values. In other words, he rose above identity politics to something that most people could agree was true about themselves. The fact that Wall was a skilled and eloquent communicator didnt hurt either.

The relatively non-ideological nature of the Saskatchewan Partys appeal dovetails with the non-ideological nature of the mainstream of Saskatchewan and, I would argue, Canadian voters. Most Canadians believe in hard work, family, friends, the community they live in, a private-sector-led economy open to international trade and a government that reflects their beliefs and desires, not one that imposes its beliefs on them.

But they are also practical in their outlook. What appeals to them is politicians who are not rigidly ideological, but able and willing to be pragmatic when necessary. Such pragmatism helps to earn the publics trust; that makes bigger change possible later as people gain confidence that change is driven by the practical successes of the reforms that went before. Less Axe the Tax and Defund the CBC and more Incremental change that respects our history and beliefs.

As Dale Eisler said to me, the Saskatchewan Partys populism, is rooted in conservatism, but has emotional appeal to people who are not overly ideological. Whats needed is a political leadership that rises above identity politics and talks to people in terms of shared beliefs that serve to unify, not divide, while pursuing conservative principles.

No formula confers permanent political success. But nearly 15 years into the Saskatchewan Partys reign the party gets six out of ten votes in the province and the NDP just lost another leader after a by-election loss in a normally safe seat. Saskatchewan shows that a progressive past is no bar to a conservative future, but also that understanding and caring about voters values beats ideological purity any day.

Brian Lee Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. His most recent book is,Gardeners vs. Designers: Understanding the Great Fault Line in Canadian Politics.

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Saskatchewan Party populism the model to unseat Trudeau Liberals: Brian Lee Crowley in the National Post - Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Terms of Trade | What drives competitive populism in India? – Hindustan Times

Indias top bureaucrats are worried about political parties resorting to competitive populism and announcing fiscally unsustainable schemes to win votes in state elections. Reports suggest that they voiced these concerns to the Prime Minister in a meeting on April 2.

We did not need secretaries of the government of India to highlight the growing tendency towards competitive populism in India. Political parties are increasingly promising all sorts of things to voters from restoration of the old pension scheme for government employees to cash and two-wheelers for students who enter or finish college and free pilgrimage to senior citizens.

Is this new wave of competitive populism going to lead to a fiscal disaster in the country? Who exactly is responsible for this kind of behaviour? And can a political consensus be built to prevent such spending by state governments?

How big a problem is competitive populism in India?

This is not an easy question to answer. A state can spend money on providing free food over and above what the Public Distribution System (PDS) entitlements provide for, or it can spend money giving scooters to students who have entered college. There are enough examples of political parties making such promises in India.

And there is bipartisan support for this kind of politics. For example, both the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) led government in Kerala and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh banked heavily on the free ration scheme in the elections held in 2021 and 2022. The Congress accused the BJP of copying its demand of giving free scooters to women students in the recently held Uttar Pradesh elections.

While a fiscal hawk will scoff at both kinds of spending, especially if the state is hard-pressed for resources, the actual economic impact of such programmes is likely to be quite different. Additional food entitlements are likely to generate tailwinds for aggregate demand as the recipient households will be able to spend the money they would have had to spend on food on other items. Such a scheme is also targeted towards the most needy. The same cannot be said about gifting scooters to students. That money would have had a better use somewhere else. Similarly, farm loan waivers are a sub-optimal use of money towards throwing palliatives at what is a structural problem and often at the cost of long-term spending in agriculture.

This qualitative difference in the effect of various populist schemes also underlines the pitfalls of reading too much into headline numbers on categories such as social service spending by state governments. Building a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative database of what and where exactly state governments are spending on populist schemes, and how it is affecting the macroeconomy and society is a project which can keep even a large think tank busy for the next couple of years.

What drives this political behaviour?

The lack of clarity on the second question is the biggest reason why some of these schemes have attracted economists who use randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to understand policy decisions and their impact in India.

While the RCT method has been duly recognised with a Nobel Prize to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer in 2019, there is an illustrious list of economists who have spoken against the dangers of relying too much on RCTs to make large policy decisions. The short point is, economists, on their own, are unlikely to arrive at an agreement on the impact or efficacy of such policies.

This brings us to the question of why are politicians doing this? The clichd answer that they do not care about fiscal prudence will not suffice, because state governments have to adhere to a more stringent fiscal norm than the Centre in India. When read with the fact that states have been left with very little tax sovereignty after the roll-out of Goods and Services Tax (GST), this is an even more intriguing question.

At the risk of oversimplification, one can say that the best answer to this question was given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a campaign speech during the recently held Uttar Pradesh elections. Speaking at a rally on February 20, Modi referred to a social media video, where an old woman was pledging loyalty to the BJP because she had tasted Modis salt (ration) and therefore wont ditch him. While this can sound like usual election rhetoric to some, political scientists have been arguing that the BJP has been making a concerted effort to centralise welfare delivery which also leads to greater attribution for giving these benefits to none other than the Prime Minister.

This extraordinary centralisation of power, not just institutionally but also within the BJP, implies that the voter is increasingly likely to attribute (that is, give credit for) the delivery of economic benefits to Modi rather than the state-level leader. This contrasts with much of the 2000s, where, after a spate of fiscal decentralisation, several state-level leaders built their reputations on the ability to deliver benefits Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research argued in a March 2021 Economic and Political Weekly article.

While Sircar argues that this process has also weakened the welfare credentials of chief ministers from the BJP and its allies too, and they will most likely look to establish their credentials not in welfare delivery but in Hindu mobilisation, it is not surprising that the anti-BJP parties have been trying to outdo the BJP by promising more populist schemes. Promises such as restoration of old pensions scheme and cash transfers by anti-BJP parties need to be seen in this light.

As is obvious, competitive populism by regional political forces is a last-ditch attempt to push back against the BJP which is the new national political hegemon in India. To meet such challenges, the BJP also indulges in competitive populism at the level of states, not to speak to decisions such as implementing PM-Kisan, which gives 6,000 to every farmer in India, from the Centre a decision taken after the BJP lost crucial state elections just before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Realpolitik suggests that regional parties are unlikely to prioritise long-term economic health over political survival. And that perhaps answers the third question.

Every Friday, HTs data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal

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Terms of Trade | What drives competitive populism in India? - Hindustan Times

The Struggle for the Soul of the GOP – The New Republic

By his wedding day, Continetti had established himself as one of the Rights rising stars. He had published two books and had just launched a new outlet, The Washington Free Beacon, backed by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, and designed to serve as a conservative rejoinder to left-leaning websites like ThinkProgress. A presentable white guy with glasses and a full head of hairimagine if Chris Hayes had a Republican cousinContinetti was an ideal face for the respectable Right in the Obama era, a polite young man who happened to believe that fiscal responsibility entailed taking a meat cleaver to the welfare state. While Breitbart News was running a vertical on black crime, The Washington Free Beacon was earning praise from liberals for its commitment to breaking news. Continetti poked the establishment to get its attention, not to draw blood. I dont listen to talk radio, he told an interviewer. I listen to NPR. To liberals, the signals were clear. He was on the Right, sure, but he wasnt one of them.

And yet he could always be trusted to advance the conservative line with absolute sincerity. His second book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, offered a prickly defense of an unpredictable and courageous politician in the grand American populist tradition. After the Tea Party made its debut, he celebrated the emergence of a grassroots movement devoted to self-reliance, fidelity, piety, industry, and responsibility. Continettis dreams of a populism fueled by entitlement reform had zero space for Occupy Wall Street. Inequalities of condition are a fact of life, he lectured as protesters were streaming to Zuccotti Park in 2011. Some people will always be poorer than others.

If one figure stood for Continettis ideal politician, it was Paul Ryan. A decade older than Continetti, Ryan was another clean-cut veteran of the conservative establishment. Continetti described him as the brains behind the Tea Party and called Ryans budget programincluding major reductions in government spending, tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, and privatization of Medicarethe GOPs only ambitious and intellectually coherent policy response to a looming fiscal crisis. (Steve Bannon, who had a very different view of what fueled the Tea Party, called Ryan a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.) The details of Ryanism were politically toxic, but Continetti didnt worry about the polls. Ideas, even controversial ones, are not hindrances in politics but boosters, he wrote. They propel you to the top. When Ryan looked set to take over as speaker of the House in October 2015, Continetti saw it as a coming-of-age moment for the Rights next generation. Liberals are terrified of what these young conservatives might accomplish, he wrote. Liberals should be.

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The Struggle for the Soul of the GOP - The New Republic

The godfather of populism: Silvio Berlusconi bows out of politics – TheArticle

So. Farewell then, Silvio Berlusconi. The tone of Private Eyes obituarist and poet in residence seems somehow appropriate for a man who never seemed to take either politics or himself entirely seriously. Abroad, this most colourful of post-war Italian politicians will be remembered less for his impact on Europe than for his Bunga Bunga parties and other playboy extravagances. He was a media magnate who never ceased to provide copy for the tabloids, whether incessant speculation about possible Mafia connections, thousands of courtroom appearances, or his constant, hitherto seemingly irresistible comebacks.

In the end, only the frailties of old age seem to have persuaded Berlusconi to bring down the curtain on his own political career. At 85, he still hoped to enjoy one final act, with a bid for the biggest job of all: head of state. He might even have got away with it, had not a lifetime of overindulgence finally caught up with him. A heart condition serious enough to require hospitalisation is the official reason, though doubtless not the only one, for the former crooner who liked to be known as il Cavaliere to take his last bow.

Yet Berlusconis career has changed the world more than most of his rivals on the world stage. Long before Donald Trump, he was the godfather of populism. Unlike Trump, who was just a media personality, Berlusconi actually owned the media. At the height of his power, he was estimated to enjoy, directly or indirectly, control over 90 per cent of the Italian press and broadcasting. Whereas Trump was just one of many New York real estate billionaires, Berlusconi was the richest man in Italy. And he used his wealth and control of the media ruthlessly to dominate politics for a generation. Berlusconi was the original, Trump merely the imitation.

Though he held office for less than a decade, that was enough to make him the longest serving Prime Minister in post-war Italy. Indeed, over the century and a half since the unification of the Risorgimento era, the only men to have led Italy for longer were the liberal Giovanni Giolitti and the fascist Benito Mussolini. Berlusconi was so often compared to the latter that he developed a soft spot for the Duce though he did not approve of the fascists anti-Semitic laws. In 2003, the then Prime Minister told the Spectators Nicholas Farrell and the magazines then editor that Mussolini was not a bad leader: he never had his opponents killed, but merely sent them on holiday.

That editor was a certain Boris Johnson. Was Berlusconi a role model for the man who became Britains Prime Minister 16 years later? To ask the question is to realise how absurd the comparison really is. Were Johnson to have been accused of any one of the myriad crimes and scandals in which Berlusconi has been embroiled, his career would never even have got off the ground. In spite of the overblown rhetoric of their accusers, Boris is no more a populist than Silvio is a fascist.

Just as Britain has genuine populists, such as Nigel Farage, so Italy has had genuine neo-fascists, such as the postwar Italian Social Movement (MSI) and its later offshoot, the National Alliance (AN) of Gianfranco Fini. Yet although Berlusconis own party, Forza Italia, has sometimes been in coalition with Fini, this was only after Fini had distanced himself from Mussolinis legacy.

What is undeniable, however, is that Berlusconi has contributed to the return of authoritarian politics in Italy. The fact that he has exercised a control over his national media of which even Rupert Murdoch could only dream has undoubtedly made it easier for far-Right parties, such as the Brothers of Italy, to gain a sizeable parliamentary foothold. That power has also enabled Berlusconi to keep the judges at bay whom he has accused of defying democracy in their pursuit of him.

The Spectator interview took place at Berlusconis villa in Sardinia, where the notorious Bunga Bunga parties took place that eventually contributed to his downfall. Over the past seven years he has been embroiled in a series of trials for bribing underage girls to keep quiet about what happened at these parties. Together with his conviction for tax fraud in 2013, Berlusconis legal travails had kept him out of public office for several years until just before the pandemic.

What, if anything, did Berlusconi achieve? The fact that he had never held public office until he burst onto the political scene in the mid-1990s was one of the main reasons for his popularity in a country where most voters assumed that all politicians were corrupt. Berlusconi was so rich and so powerful that he was presumed by many to be impossible to bribe, and consequently worthy of their trust. Unfortunately the experiment, repeated many times since, has never proved the correctness of this presumption. Tycoons, it seems, are no less dishonest than the rest, merely more munificent.

At the European level, Berlusconi was often treated as a buffoon, particularly by the more sober-sided northern leaders such as Angela Merkel. On one occasion, he was recorded telling a newspaper editor that the German Chancellor was an unfuckable lard-arse. It was left to Jeremy Paxman in 2014 to ask the now ex-Prime Minister whether he had used these words. The footage, which can be viewed here, is priceless. After a long silence, in which Berlusconi gesticulates to feign shock at such language, he replies that in 20 years in politics I have never insulted anyone.

Perhaps this exchange should be the Cavalieres epitaph. Having transformed Italian politics from a sinister harlequinade into an absurdist opera buffa, Berlusconi can claim at least to have modernised its style and idiom. His debauchery may have lowered the tone of public life in the Eternal City; unlike the Church, however, he never claimed to be holier than thou. In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI told the Prime Minister, then mired in scandal, to rediscover his spiritual and moral foundations. Berlusconi prefers Benedicts successor, Pope Francis, who is less intellectual and more worldly. He once remarked that Francis acts as Pope in exactly the way I would. Some have even joked that if the Quirinale, the Presidential palace in Rome, were to elude him, Berlusconi would set his sights on the Vatican.

Despite the ongoing court cases, at least he will avoid ending his days behind bars. At the climax of Puccinis opera Tosca, the eponymous heroine throws herself to her death from the parapet of the Castel Sant Angelo, the papal prison, to evade capture. Silvio Berlusconi has no need of such desperate measures. Convicted of tax evasion, he benefited from a law he had passed while in office: those over 70 cannot be sent to prison. Handed down a four year sentence, he spent just one of them doing community service in a care home. Silvio the silver fox has always had the last laugh.

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The godfather of populism: Silvio Berlusconi bows out of politics - TheArticle

In an era of rightwing populism, we cannot destroy democracy in order to save it – The Guardian

The recent anniversary of the Trumpian riot at the Capitol building highlighted a growing anxiety about the state of democracy both in America and around the world.

In a widely circulated article, the Canadian professor Thomas Homer-Dixon warned of a rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030. At the same time, a Quinnipiac University poll found nearly 60% of Americans believed their democracy is in danger of collapse.

Internationally, the Stockholm based-NGO International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance says more nations than ever before faced democratic erosion, while Freedom House argues that in every region of the world, democracy is under attack by populist leaders and groups that reject pluralism and demand unchecked power.

Unfortunately, in response to that rightwing populist threat, many centrists fall back to the bad arguments of the past.

In the wake of the first world war, US journalist Walter Lippmann claimed the mass media and its techniques of persuasion rendered the ordinary voter so susceptible to propaganda as to render democracy unworkable.

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions, he complained, has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding.

Lippmann drew explicitly on a critique made by Plato in The Republic, where the philosopher described the Athenian assembly as giving liberty to demagogues. Such men, Plato explained, used rhetoric and emotion to whip up the masses behind power-hungry rogues, rather than allowing competent leaders to rule.

Following Trumps shock election in 2016, a modern-day version of this argument became a kind of centrist common sense, neatly captured in a viral New Yorker cartoon by Will McPhail. The drawing showed an airline passenger addressing others in the plane: These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?

The gag was widely circulated by liberals aghast at Trumps policies. Yet, as Ive argued elsewhere, rather than critiquing his racism and sexism the cartoon implied that the problem lay with a system that allowed ordinary people to opine on matters they werent qualified to adjudicate. Running the country, the image suggested, was like flying a plane: a matter best left to the experts.

That was pretty much Platos argument the basis on which he advocated a dictatorship by philosopher kings.

Yet, contrary to what centrists claim, the real problem with rightwing populism is not that its populist but rather that its not and cant be populist enough.

The evolution of the Republican party into a vehicle for Trumpian populism provides a good illustration. The Washington Post recently noted that at least 163 politicians who accept Trumps false claims about fraud in the 2020 poll are now running for statewide positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections.

That matters because legislatures dominated by Trump supporters have already been cracking down on mail-in ballots, imposing onerous ID requirements and otherwise making voting more difficult, with the nonpartisan Brennan Centre for Justice reporting at least 19 states imposing laws in 2021 that restricted voting access in some way.

Why do those associated with Donald Trump seek a restricted franchise?

A movement dominated by the super-wealthy and exploiting racial and gender anxieties relies upon exclusion. Despite its populist rhetoric, Trumpian demagoguery appeals to a minority: it cannot offer solutions to the population of an increasingly diverse nation.

The key to defeating Trump thus lies in mobilising ordinary people to articulate their real needs.

But across the United States, the legislative response to the Capitol riot pushed by Democrats has centred not on extending democratic rights but on laws criminalising demonstrations.

As Branko Marcetic points out, the aftermath of 6 January saw a crackdown on dissent: a dramatic increase in anti-protest bills around the country, including at least 88 that have been introduced since the Capitol riot; a massive buildup of the Capitol police into a national force to target terrorism; as well as the rollout by the Biden administration of a sweeping domestic counter-terror strategy.

The strategy includes on its list of domestic violent extremists groups such as environmentalists, anti-capitalists and animal rights activists, all of whom youd expect to play an important role in a movement against Trump to cultivate.

During the Vietnam war, an American commander supposedly explained the necessity of destroying a village in order to save it. In an era of rightwing populism, we need to ensure that the defences of democracy doesnt follow a similar logic.

Instead, progressives require a program that, as Nicholas Tampio puts it, treats people as citizens that is, as adults capable of thoughtful decisions and moral actions, rather than as children who need to manipulated. That means entrusting them with meaningful opportunities to participate in the political process rather than simply expecting them to vote for one or another leader on polling day.

Democracy isnt an institution. Its a practice and, as such, it becomes stronger through use.

Thats the real problem. Whens the last time you felt your opinion actually mattered in your daily life? How often do you take part in democratic debates in your workplace, your neighbourhood, your trade union or your community group?

The withering of opportunities for ordinary people to exercise meaningful power over their collective affairs gives the Platonic critique of democracy an unwarranted credibility.

Conversely, the more we practise governing ourselves by debating, by organising, by demonstrating and protesting the more natural democracy seems and the more isolated demagogues become.

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In an era of rightwing populism, we cannot destroy democracy in order to save it - The Guardian

Tryst with Strong Leader Populism review: The rise to absolute power – The Hindu

The objectives of the study on How Modis hybrid regime model [is] reshaping political narratives, ecosystems and national symbols are ambitious. The projects of the ruling party are certainly ambitious. It wishes to spatially and ideologically remake the country by reconstructing Lutyens Delhi, by building a temple where once a grand mosque stood, by introducing a political language that cares two hoots for propriety, and by superciliously dismissing the contributions of Jawaharlal Nehru to democracy.

Has it succeeded? Perhaps yes. Barely 10 years ago scholars were writing on multiculturalism, secularism, and minority rights. Today we are back to where modern political theory began the right to life and liberty in times of mob lynching and police atrocities. How did the political mood turn around so quickly? P. Raman in this detailed exposition of one mans rise to absolute power answers the question very well.

Standing up to the RSS

The story begins on February 19, 2013, when Mohan Bhagwat assured the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) hierarchys full support to Modi as the prime ministerial candidate. Very soon Modi defied the fundamental presupposition of the organisation; that the individual, no matter how powerful he may be, is subordinate to the collective. He informed senior leaders that he would always be there whenever they called. There was no need to set up a coordination committee to regulate the relationship between a future government and the RSS. In any case his Mission-272, that of securing a majority in Parliament, was intended to reduce dependence on secular allies. He would institutionalise Hindutva so dear to the heart of RSS leaders. They need not worry.

Some leaders were nevertheless wary of him. His commitment to liberalisation and to the corporatisation of the economy went against Swadeshi so ardently defended by the organisation. But he was backed enthusiastically by RSS supremo Bhagwat. He was also openly supported by top corporate leaders of initially Gujarat, and then from the rest of the country. The scene was set for the rise of a classical kind of authoritarian political boss... Like the elected dictators the world over, he communicated directly to voters and party ranks. Modis political strategy was a deadly mix of hard Hindutva and unadulterated neoliberal framework.

Old vs. the new

Economic liberalisation was conjoined to political illiberalism. The former was secured by corporates. They placed their enormous funds, their media houses, PR agents, digital engineers and survey agencies at the feet of an incoming Modi regime. Political illiberalism was secured by Hindutva that relentlessly subordinates individual citizens to the nation conceived of in purely majoritarian terms, argues Raman.

Around the twin planks of his ideology gathered WhatsApp administrators, lynch mobs coordinators, those who rallied audiences, cash dispensers and alcohol distributors, says Raman. Modi rallies have rewritten the grammar of how elections are fought. His image was projected on gigantic screens, and cheer leaders outshouted other BJP leaders. He was presented as Indias new messiah, the conquering hero who would vanquish the old elite.

No visibility and voice

The BJP came to power in 2014 and we witnessed the quick degeneration of parliamentary democracy into autocratic populism. Under the Modi regime, elected ministers have been reduced to nothing. They have little visibility and even less voice. The PM chastises them as if they are schoolboys. They are not invited to meetings he holds with their bureaucrats. Civil servants are responsible directly to him. All decisions of ministries have to be cleared by the Prime Ministers Office. RSS leaders monitored the government for the first two years. With the appointment of Amit Shah as the party president, the rules changed. The RSS was pushed to the margins.

Centralised rule seldom makes for good governance though. Badly conceptualised policies of demonetisation and GST led to chaos and intensified poverty. Schemes announced with much fanfare lapsed, and the enthusiasm of the leadership waned.

As power came to be centralised in the office of the prime minister, organisations meant to share power or check it, from the RBI to the CBI were hijacked. Yet the Modi juggernaut continued to roll. The BJP secured even more seats in the 2019 general election. This encouraged the government to unfurl the full agenda of Hindutva from Kashmir to Ayodhya and beyond.

Demise of institutions

In the last chapter, Raman surveys the literature on authoritarian populism and concludes that the concept is appropriate for India. The country has seen the personalisation of power and the demise of institutions ranging from Parliament to civil society. Enthusiastically acclaimed by a media that forgets that it is a part of civil society which keeps watch on the exercise of power, and not a PR arm of the government, Modi has succeeded in making people forget the tragedies his misconceived policies have heaped on India. We are left to ponder an unpalatable question. Have Indians become apolitical, more attracted to strong leaders rather than democratic ones?

Tryst with Strong Leader Populism; P. Raman, Aakar Publications, 695.

The reviewer is Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Equity Studies.

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Tryst with Strong Leader Populism review: The rise to absolute power - The Hindu

Cityshaping without the politics of populism and polarisation – Building Design

Cycling to work this week I listened to a podcast hosted by the two-wheel nuts Toby Fox and David Taylor who use a Desert Island Discs-inspired format to conduct a long-form conversation with a built environment specialist and committed cyclist. The latest episode of Tracks Of My Tyres features Patricia Brown who runs Central, a consultancy that provides strategic advice on city infrastructure, development and regeneration.

Pats entire career has been built on her innate ability to connect people to create collaborative environments in order to make change happen. As I listened I couldnt help but think this was a podcast that everyone in our industry right now should be listening to.

For 10 years from 1997 Pat set up and ran the Central London Partnership, the first really significant time public and private sector came together to do things to improve London.

The private-sector property investment and development industry was flying and Pat, recognising peoples interest in improving the quality of the built environment and the feel of the city as well as their interest in investing in it, knew this could only happen if there was a collaborative effort between everyone involved to deliver it. She describes it in the podcast as enlightened self-interest on the part of the development community.

Central London Partnership brought together representatives from higher education, private-sector development, finance and investment, the cultural sector, business leaders and Londons local government, seed-funded by national government, to create a vision for future economic success built on quality of life and quality of experience of the city. It was about drawing a line under the car-dominated city of the 1970s and 80s and thinking afresh about how to create a city that moved efficiently and worked for everyone. The pedestrianisation of the north side of Trafalgar Square was one of the key interventions inspired by this process.

An early research trip to New York remember those before any kind of foreign travel by local government representatives was branded a jolly and banned? inspired the development of Londons Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to promote a sense of investment in the public realm and a shared sense of pride in the city.

In the 25 years since Pat established the Central London Partnership London has, like all major cities, suffered from the twists and turns of health, economic, social and climate emergencies. Its a bewildering task trying to work out how to respond effectively. I have often wondered why Pat has never sought formal public office to be able to drive change through the power such election would bring but, listening to her talk, I understood why. Its simply because she feels she can be so much more effective as a behind-the-scenes facilitator, convening and enabling the kind of conversations, debate and collaborative working that gets things done.

Its a rare skill to understand with such sensitivity the inter-connectivity of the myriad components of what makes successful urbanism and the economic and social sustainability of a city. Pat believes that we should be spending more time talking together and reaching consensus about agendas rather than specific places. This is at odds with the nature of the development industry that is in business to build specific schemes by negotiating the planning system with local authority regulators.

She talks about aggregation how do we ensure the widest possible buy-in to the issues that most effectively shape the wider city? This seems crucial in a post-covid world where it is not remotely clear to me who is leading Londons recovery, exploring ideas for change that will not only allow us to build back but, in the governments words, to build back better.

Its also about easing conflict. Just bringing people together doesnt automatically mean they will agree. Careful negotiation, led by experienced facilitators, is necessary to find consensus among a raft of competing agendas and ideas about the best way forward.

How, for instance, do we most effectively reconcile the needs of motorists, cyclists and pedestrians in a city thats short of space? Empathy has to replace anger and conflict and that needs encouraging and shepherding to create a shared vision of a good life that works for everyone. You could argue that this kind of consensus-seeking slows things down its an argument we hear over and over in opposition to proportional representation. But Id take slower consensus over speedier autocracy (or even inaction) any day of the week.

Pats newest move is a project she calls London 3.0. It follows the London 1.0 that she was instrumental in defining in the late 1990s and the London 2.0 that began with the arrival of the GLA and the London mayoralty. Its driven from her belief that London is a city that needs constant reinvention and the only way to do that is to bring together everyone with a stake in its success around a virtual table, spotting links and leading agendas around which they can reach consensus. I think, right now, we need this more than ever.

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Cityshaping without the politics of populism and polarisation - Building Design

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

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

Patel’s navy Channel threat once again exposes the Tory’s militarist populism – The Canary

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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 speeds linked to lower civic engagement in UK – The Guardian

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

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

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

Willie, Nay. Apu, Aye – The American Conservative

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

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

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

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

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...