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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos by Adam Schultz/Biden for President and Gage Skidmore via Flickr

In this Question of the Week podcast episode, College of Arts & Sciences political scientist Lauren Mattioli assesses Joe Biden one year after his election. Promising to jettison Trumpism, the president has lowered the rhetorical thermostat, Mattioli says, but in areas like immigration, he is disappointing supporters with a populist politics, while GOP obstructionism imperils the rest of his agenda.

You can also find this episode onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Podcasts, andother podcast platforms.

Dana Ferrante: This is Question of the Week, from BU Today. Has Joe Biden jettisoned Trumpism and populist politics as promised? In this episode, Rich Barlow, BU Today senior writer, talks to Lauren Mattioli, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of political science, about whether Biden has lowered the temperature, as he promised, and abandoned the incendiary style of governance of his predecessor.

One year after the 2020 presidential election, Mattioli discusses which aspects of Trumpism Biden has rejected, and whether there are some aspects he has not.

Rich Barlow: Thank you, Professor Mattioli, for joining us this week.

Lauren Mattioli: Sure. Happy to be here.

Barlow: We are roughly one year after the presidential election of 2020. Has Joe Biden abandoned Trumpism and populist politics as he promised?

Mattioli: I wanted to push you a little bit on your working definition of Trumpism, to see if we have the same one. I think I might have a guess of what your definition of Trumpism is, but if you wouldnt mind explaining a little bit, that would probably make it easier for me to answer.

Barlow: Well, partly, stylistically being the incendiary center of attention 24/7 with tweets in the wee hours that consume the news cycle. And substantively, I guess populist politics would be policies that made up his MAGA platform, from immigration restrictionsand I think, what a lot of people would say, being a window, or a channel, for white grievance.

Mattioli: So yeah, it sounds like were working with the same ideas. I guess I was thinking more about the substance I think the question of whether the Trumpistic style rhetoric has changed is pretty self-evident. Not only do we see a different tone when Biden speaks, but also hes letting the members of his administration do the talking sometimes. And relying on his very competent communication staff and press staff. So I think thats one feature of the rhetoric thats really different. Also, just in terms of the text analysis that Ive done, hes using less incendiary language. Hes not using the types of words that we would normally associate with ideological extremism.

And then substantively, I guess, I thought of Trumpism as having three primary components, at least as far as he and Biden differ. So, the sort of general international relations isolationism, where it was a very America-centric, isolationist policy. And I think Biden, by reengaging in the Paris Climate Accord and with the WHO, reversing the travel ban from primarily Muslim countries, rebuilding our refugee resettlement program, that those are all policy steps that hes taken that I think show a distinct, substantive shift.

Another isI think Trumpism, as you mentioned, is sort of a window, or a sounding board, or a welcome of a set of thoughts around white grievance. And to me, Trumpism was about conserving the status quo around race and gender and anti-progressivism on those fronts. And I think Biden has made some progress on that.

Hes done a couple of things within the administration, like creating this gender policy council and asking the Department of Education to look back over their policies regarding education and sexual violence rules [which Betsy DeVos, Trumps education secretary, had rolled back]. President Trump talked about COVID as being the China virus, whereas the Biden administration has created a task force to combat racism against Asian [Americans] and Pacific Islanders.

So I think thats a big distinction just in policy, and in rhetoric around race, gender, and sexual violence. I forgot to also mention the reversal of the transgender ban on the military. And last, there was this element of Trumpism that was like very pro-business, pro-elite, which is sort of in opposition to what we would normally think of as populism.

But I think if anything, Biden is more populist in that regard, in terms of focusing on labor and the economically marginal, whereas some of the Trump administration policies were actively antagonizing problems that the economically marginal face. But, I wouldnt say complete abandonment is the right characterization of the Biden administration, because theres still lots of rhetoric that is very popular around traditional isolationism, like this Buy American policy within the Biden administration, which is reminiscent of the economic isolationism that was characteristic of the Trump administration.

[Biden has] maintained the steel tariffs that were so controversial during the Trump administration Also, I think the maltreatment of allies, which [has not been] so bad in the Biden administration, but was particularly heightened during this recent debacle with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so I dont think its a total abandonment of populist policies and rhetoric, [but] its certainly toned down.

Its definitely a shift away from this individual-centered, charismatic leadership thats vested in ideological extremism. And so, definitely a shift rhetorically and substantively, but maybe not as far as Biden supporters might have hoped.

Barlow: You mentioned [its] not as far as his supporters had hopedcritics would also say that Bidens immigration policy and his fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan are also reminiscent of Trumpism.

What changes should he make in his approach?

Mattioli: I think I want to take those in turn. So, I think the Afghanistan withdrawal was going to be thorny for any president that tried to do something, instead of just continuing to kick that policy can down the road. But I think this was a particularly poor handling of it.

And policy obviously matters, but how we talk about policy decisions matters [too], and I think Bidens rhetoric around Afghanistan was really problematic. I think it was an Al Jazeera article that described it as humility free, and I liked that because weve come to associate Biden with being almost self-effacing and a humble everyman. But then in discussing Afghanistan, he really isnt owning the mistakes that are very clear to his detractors.

And I think thats sort of interesting, because that was what many people thought was good about Biden as a contrast to Trump. But I think on the Afghanistan thing, the idea of not owning the problemsthere may have been problems inevitablybut I think failing to acknowledge them is undermining the overall effort.

It was going to be difficult no matter what. But the way hes dealt with it I think has exacerbated the problem. And then on immigration, this is the characteristic of democratic infightingthe rhetoric isnt the issue as much as the policy. So in contrast to Afghanistan, yeah, the border has still, I think as of two or three days ago, its still using public health measures to keep people from entering the country, still putting children in cages.

And theres no rhetoric that can excuse that. So I think the change you need to make on immigration is to stop using [Title] 42 [the principal set of public health rules and regulations issued by US federal agencies] to expel immigrants. Its offensive to the public health policy. We cant say we have this new turning point in the administration of a pandemic and then co-opt public health to serve a political agenda.

And then I think, generally, the move after that sort of long-term goal needs to be developing a legitimate process for dealing with asylum cases that can deal with this influx. If the system is overwhelmed, its not the asylum seekers fault, its the systems fault and the system needs to be reformed.

And I think that would require effort and also acknowledgement of the failures of the administration. And I havent seen that decisively.

Barlow: Youre a scholar of the American presidency and American government. So let me play devils advocate and ask you this: you talked about the presidents failures of humility on Afghanistan and policy on immigration, but with Republicans bent on obstruction, pretty much of anything he does, and Democrats bitterly divided among themselves, is quiet and successful governance possible for any president these days?

Mattioli: This is a question that I might steal from you and put on my final exam the next time I teach the presidency. Im not sure if weve ever had quiet, successful governance, I want to push back on that, [but] youre right, the policy for Republicans in Congress has been total obstruction of a Democratic presidents agenda.

And thats forced Democratic presidents and some Republican presidents facing divided government to act unilaterally. And so the source of successful governance comes from the executive branch and to a lesser extent the judiciary. So the prospect for good governance if nothing substantive can come out of Congresswe still have options, maybe less attractive options and less democratic, majoritarian options, but therere still possibilities for governance through unilateral executive action and through case-by-case policy-making, what I call judicial policy-making in the courts.

And Democrats are divided on breadth and depth of policy change, and the sort of exhaustion of effort amongst themselves isI think theyre putting a lot into identifying precisely what policy should look like without an eye towards actually getting those policies through Congress. Not to say that theyre totally not forecasting the possibilities, but I think the focus needs to be on overcoming obstructionism rather than overcoming their own internal factions, which is easier said than done, of course.

And then, probably the better approach politically for them will be focusing on winning a unified government come election time next year. And in the meantime, putting Republicans in a position where they have to make unpopular votes and force them to sort of call the bluff. Thats something thatweve seen [in] the sort of blame game politicking that has been successful to a certain extent in the past.

But whos going to suffer are the people who need policy, like Americans who need health care and need food aid and need unemployment insurance. And so the cost of obstruction then is public good. So a successful governance is going to have to come from someplace other than Congress, I think, so long as trends continue as they have been.

Barlow: And that place would be?

Mattioli: I think the executive branch and the courts. I think the prospects for major policy changesexcept for maybe on infrastructure, which is sort of shown to be the only bipartisan issue thats getting real momentumwell have to see about any major policy advancement; I think thats going to have to happen unilaterally through the executive branch, which will be unpopular, but so will not doing anything.

Barlow: I was going to ask, thats a gamble for the president, right?

Mattioli: Of course.

Barlow: Some pundits are saying that if he cant achieve anything between now and the midterms, or cant achieve much of his agenda, and a lot of his agenda cant be achieved, unless Im wrong, solely by executive action, the Democrats can take a shellacking next year.

Mattioli: Yeah, I think Democrats want to avoid committing the sins of the 2010 midterms, where having a unified Democratic Congress, they were able to get a lot of policies through and were basically saying, we take full credit for everything thats happened, and then sort of got blamed for everything that didnt happen that may have been due to obstructionism.

Unified government doesnt mean complete consensus on everything. So I think if theyre smart, Democrats will have to make it clear what theyre going to really take credit for. And politicians are horrible about this, right? They take credit for successes even if they arent theirs, and they reject their culpability and failures, even if they are theirs.

And then itll be up to voters to decide whos responsible. So its possible, youre right, that Democrats could take a shellacking and could really face defeat in the midterms, if Biden doesnt get a lot of [his agenda] through, with the caveat that if he can successfully blame Republicans, it may not be the case.

Ferrante: Thanks to Lauren Mattioli for joining us on this episode of Question of the Week. If you liked the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and never miss an episode. Im Dana Ferrante; see you next week

More:

Has Joe Biden Abandoned Trumpism and Populist Politics? - BU Today

The culture war in the U.S. has been raging for more than 50 years, ever since the 1960s when divisions over values (civil rights, diversity, sexual liberation) began to emerge. Those divisions have intensified to the point where today, the defining issues of American politics involve race, sex, religion and education more than economics.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the question that best defined partisanship was, Which side do you favor more business or labor? Today, the defining questions at least for white voters would be, Do you have a college degree? and How often do you go to church?

Liberals dominate American culture. According to statistics recently cited by Elisabeth Zerofsky in the New York Times, Conservatives compose a minimal percentage of Silicon Valley; their influence is declining in the corporate world; and they are all but absent from mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. All institutions dominated by educated elites.

Conservatives are using their political power to challenge liberal domination of the culture. Left-wing populism has always been economic, driven by resentment of the rich. Populist hero and three-time Democratic nominee for president William Jennings Bryan once called Republicans the party representing nothing but an organized appetite. Right-wing populism is cultural, driven by resentment of educated elites and their cosmopolitan values especially educated elites who tell them what to do, like get vaccinated or mask their children, or obey quarantines and lockdowns.

Liberals sometimes feed this resentment by showing condescension. Barack ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaObama honors Jay-Z as 'the embodiment of the American Dream' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up Virginia set to elect first woman of color for lieutenant governor MORE criticized small-town voters who cling to guns and religion. Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonFranken rules out challenge against Gillibrand for Senate seat Abedin says anger over Weiner 'almost killed me' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up MORE called Trump supporters a basket of deplorables.

Conservative political power is based on two things: structural advantages and intensity of opinion.

A lot of Democratic House votes are wasted because Democrats are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas. In the 2020 election, the average margin of victory for House Democrats was 31.5 percent and for House Republicans, 26.0 percent.

The fact that every state elects two senators creates a disadvantage for large urban Democratic states like New York, California and Illinois. Article V of the Constitution provides that No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate. It is the only provision of the Constitution that can never be amended (something insisted upon by southern slave states, which feared becoming outnumbered by northern free states).

Following the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, when the popular vote winners lost the electoral vote, Democrats protested the undemocratic nature of the electoral college. But no move was taken to change the system.

Right now, gerrymandering is aiming to ensure Republican control of the U.S. House and most state legislatures. Republicans control the redistricting process in 20 states, with 187 U.S. House seats. Democrats control redistricting in eight states with 75 House seats. (The remaining House seats are in states with one at-large seat or divided party control, or independent redistricting commissions.)

Conservatives usually have another advantage intensity. Polling has a dirty little secret: Polls don't measure intensity of opinion very well. Typically, polls can tell you how many people are on each side of an issue, but not whether they feel so strongly about the issue that it's likely to drive their vote. And that's what really matters to politicians.

Let's say you take a poll and show a politician that his constituents divide 75 to 25 percent in favor of gun control. The politician knows what will happen if he votes for a gun control law: Maybe 5 percent of the 75 percent majority care enough about the issue to vote for him for that reason alone, but he may lose 20 out of the 25 percent on the other side. Gun owners may be a minority, but many of them see gun control as a threat to their Second Amendment rights. It drives their votes. And they make sure politicians know it.

On a lot of social issues, the right is more intensely committed than the left. Call it the passion gap. That's why conservatives have often won battles over gun rights and abortion and immigration. They are more watchful, better funded, better organized and angry. They let politicians know that if they dare to take the wrong position, a posse of voters will come after them.

Why are gun owners so politically powerful? a pro-choice activist once said to me in an interview. There are more uterus owners than gun owners. And when uterus owners begin to vote this issue, we will win.

The left typically gets passionate over anti-war issues. That's when the passion gap tilts in their favor and Democrats win (2006, 2008). But when there is no Vietnam or Iraq war controversy, the right is typically more angry and intense. That's what sustains the talk radio industry.

Right now, conservatives feel like a persecuted minority because of the cultural dominance of the left. It has radicalized the right. Donald TrumpDonald TrumpStunning survey gives grim view of flourishing anti-democratic opinions Southwest investigating report pilot said 'Let's go Brandon' on flight Texas police refused requests to escort Biden bus surrounded by Trump supporters: report MORE did something that has never been done before: He brought the radical right to power and gave them (temporary) ascension over the cultural left. Neither he nor his supporters have any intention of giving that up without a fight.

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable"(Simon & Schuster).

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2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up | TheHill - The Hill

This essay is adapted from the preface to the forthcoming paperback edition of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.

A few months after Return of the Strong Gods was published, the strong gods returned.

Panic struck in March 2020 as a virus originating in China spread around the world. Fear of death and disease rippled through the population, especially among influential, university-educated people, who in the West are especially anxious about their health and safety. Politicians responded by throwing entire countries into lockdown, an unprecedented measure that put society in a state of suspended animation for months.

Nature abhors a vacuumespecially human nature, which is sociable and restless. In June 2020, amid the existential void of the universal lockdown, police in Minneapolis arrested an agitated, unruly black man named George Floyd, who died under restraint. The result was an explosion of protests across the United States that often descended into violence and looting.

We can argue endlessly about what killed George Floyddrugs in his bloodstream, vicious police tactics, a criminal justice system that targets blacks. We can speculate why protests spread so quicklysystemic racism, endemic violence in poor black communities, networks of professional agitators. But one thing is indisputable: In the vacuum of lockdown, blood cried out from the ground. After a long season of turmoil and confinement, the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion seemed ineffectual. It was replaced by strident demands for retribution, reparation, and punishment. No justice, no peace. This is the slogan of a strong god.

We should not judge movements by extreme voices, but anyone who wishes to understand the events inspired by the slogan Black Lives Matter must pay attention to what people say, especially people of influence. In early June 2021, a woman named Aruna Khilanani revealed her fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any White person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Khilanani is not an anger-addled street-corner crank but a psychiatrist, and her words, uttered in a lecture at the Yale School of Medicine, expressed more than political correctness. She was there to worship the strong god of vengeance.

In the ensuing controversy, Khilanani insisted that she had been exaggerating for rhetorical effect, which was no doubt true. But how and when we exaggerate is revealing. Impatient with calm discussion and meticulous analysis, she will no longer deliberate about root causes. Her remarks excluded all softening gestures such as sharing perspectives or hearing new voices. The hot hyperbole rejected the open-society slogans that have dominated for so long, clichs that soften civic life and make things more porous and fluid, formulations that weaken strong claims and blur sharp boundaries.

Khilananis talk of guns and blood points in a very different direction. A powerful consensus in favor of fluid openness was embraced by the left and right in recent decades. I call it the postwar consensus, because I trace its origins to the American-led reconstruction of the West after Auschwitz. In my reading of recent history, that fell name denotes more than a death camp in Poland. It sums up the entire orgy of destruction that began in the trenches of World War I and ended with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The consensus that took hold after 1945 sought to dissolve the political passions that many deemed to be the underlying cause of those decades of violence. The postwar consensus sought to banish the strong gods.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the postwar consensus supported a power-sharing arrangement between the Democratic party, favoring go-fast liquefaction of traditional culture and go-slow economic deregulation, and the Republican Party, favoring go-fast economic deregulation with the hope of not-too-fast cultural deregulation. When I wrote Return of the Strong Gods, the establishment consensus in favor of openness was plain to see. And when I was writing, a rejection of open borders, open trade, and other fruits of the postwar consensus by the populist right was also obvious. The events of 2020 indicate that the strong gods are returning on the American left as well.

Return of the Strong Gods offers a succinct history of the past seven decades, most of which I have experienced as a teenager and adult. I distrust the sufficiency of singular explanations, including my own. Technological innovations (the Pill, for example) shaped that history, as did international events and economic developments. There exists no Lord of the Rings in social analysis, no single explanation that rules them all.

But I remain confident in the basic story I tell. After 1945, our ruling class agreed that powerful loves and intense loyalties make us easily manipulated by demagogues. Our passions hurl us into disastrous conflicts and brutal ideological movements. Our only hope, the postwar consensus holds, is to tamp down our loves and loyalties, to weaken them with skepticism, nonjudgmentalism, and a political commitment to an open society.

And I argue that the wheel of history is turning. The gods of weakening are losing their power over public life. Donald Trump horrified the establishment because he derided the open-society consensus. His brash Americanism, his promises to tear up trade deals, and his loud talk of building a wall thrilled voters who wanted reconsolidation not deregulation, protection not limitless openness.

You can find Trump odious or inspiring. You can reject or affirm his political priorities. But a sober observer recognizes that Trump rose to prominence because an angry populace felt betrayed by the postwar consensus. What I did not see while writing the book is that the American left, which opposed Trump bitterly, would pivot to affirm the return of its own strong gods.

Only yesterday, multicultural managers and HR bureaucrats spoke solemnly of diversity and inclusion, vague notions that serve the gods of weakening. Today, however, the same managers and bureaucrats add equity, a term that signifies a change in direction. Equity operates in the domain of justice, and justice promises not diversity but the right result. Equity encourages strong measurescondemning the unjust, punishing the oppressors, denouncing the unfairly advantaged and the wrongly privileged. Diversity is a feel-good word. Equity topples statues.

I cannot pretend to know the future. I can only take the measure of present trends. The postwar consensus trusted that a better future could be achieved by removing barriers, setting aside traditional mores, empowering individual choice, and letting markets decide. The sudden prominence of the rhetoric of equity suggests that many on the left are losing confidence in the promise of an open society. They now demand racial and sexual quotas, hard numerical measurements that cannot be evaded with avowals of good intentions. As the right demands clear and enforced borders, the left demands clear and enforced results. It wants a just society (as it conceives of it), not an open society. And it is willing to rule with an iron fist to achieve that goal.

I am suspicious of those who turn too quickly to Nazi Germany for analogies that illuminate our present distempers. But if we remain sober and do not allow ourselves to be swept up into moral and political panic, we can detect parallels. In the 1920s, conservatives in Germany distrusted the procedural justice and commercial ethos of the Weimar Republic, believing that a good society would not automatically evolve in accord with liberal principles and market forces. The future, they argued, must be shaped by a decisive act of will. A similar view is emerging on the left. Progressives are impatient. Free speech? Merit? Procedural justice? Laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race? These formal commitments must be set aside, we are told, because they stand in the way of transformative justice.

And so it is not only Trump and the populist right that wants the strong gods to return. Many on the American left look to blood for answers, a vengeful and punitive image that suggests strong gods with grim designs. They champion bloods binding power, its demand for justice, and its powerful symbolism of moral and political urgency. The signs of the times suggest that the historical thesis of the book is correct. The postwar era is ending. The strong gods are returning. Let us work to ensure that they are ennobling, not debasing, that they rebuild and renew rather than tear down and degrade.

Return of the Strong Gods has been criticized from a number of angles. I will not try to respond to all of them, but it is useful to consider some. Some have complained that my talk of strong gods is imprecise and obscure. Yes, but every consequential episode in human history is blurry and opaque, including the past seventy years. My aim is to illuminate, as best I can, our political and cultural struggles, which have become intense. The metaphor of strong gods casts useful light on our situation.

Friends counsel that I should be less enthusiastic about the return of the strong gods. I am fully aware of the dangers they pose, which is why, following the Bible, I urge a politics of noble loves. The Book of Wisdom begins with an extended allegory. Lady Wisdom goes through the city, explaining to men the bad consequences of their liaisons with prostitutes and loose women (a metaphor for idolatry). But the men are smitten, and the arguments of Lady Wisdom have no effect. Returning to her palace, she prepares a great banquet and sends her beautiful young attendants into the public square to draw in the men of the city. They come to feast, and their perverse loves are corrected by the higher love of Lady Wisdom. The opens society tries to buy peace with dispassion and small ambitions, encouraging critique and other techniques of weakening. This approach will not succeed in the long run. The only reliable safeguards against debased political passions are elevated ones.

Though many defend the status quo, I will not raise my voice in defense of the dying postwar consensus. I argue that the West overreacted. Intent on countering the evils of Auschwitz and all it represented, we embarked on a utopian project of living without shared loves and strong loyalties. Human nature was never going to allow that project to succeed. We are made for love not open-ended diversity, limitless inclusion, and relentless critique. The postwar consensus went too far, emptying our souls and desiccating our societies. So yes, the strong gods can be dangerous. But they make transcendence possible. They restore to public life spiritual drama and shared purpose.

Christian allies warn that I am insufficiently alive to the danger that populism will make an idol of the nation. In Platos Symposium, Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima, his mentor, who observed that we often love finite goods as if they were ultimate. But this is not reason to despair. For once aroused, loves ardor can be directed toward a ladder that rises from lower loves to higher ones. I hold the Platonic view. There is no guarantee that we will climb the ladder of love. Misjudging lesser goods as the highest good (the essence of idolatry) always remains a danger. But the unstated premise behind Return of the Strong Gods is that life without love is a greater evil than life in which finite loves are made absolute. I have argued for this premise in other works (see especially the essays in Fighting the Noonday Devil). Put simply, to love wrongly is dangerous, but however debasing, it is human. By contrast, to fail to love is inhuman. The deepest failure of the postwar consensus, then, is that it trains us to be loveless and therefore to be something less than human.

Let me issue my own theological warning: Beware iconoclasm. It is a heresy born of the fantasy that we can eliminate the possibility of idolatry by destroying every object of love other than the highest, which is God. Thomas Aquinas taught that grace perfects nature; it does not destroy nature. Family, team, city, countrythese social spheres rightly win our love and command our loyalty. We can be seduced and blinded by our loves. A great deal can go wrong, which is why Jesus warns us that our love of God may require us to hate our father. The same holds for fatherland. But our capacity for perversion does not destroy these natural goods. They remain worthy of our love if we will but love rightly.

Liberal allies worry that I court a dangerous illiberalism. Their concerns are overwrought, but they have a basis in truth. Our liberal traditions aim to limit the role of religious and metaphysical passions in public life. In this regard, liberalism harkens to the gods of weakening. The open-society consensus gained traction after 1945 so easily because it drew upon the liberalism that is an important part of our Anglo-American inheritance. Like my liberal critics, I cherish this inheritance. Let us by all means defend the Bill of Rights and other honorable components of our liberal tradition. But let us also remember that liberalism tempers and moderates; it does not initiate. It weeds the field but does not plant. When liberalism becomes dominant, as it has done in the postwar consensus, civic life withers, for liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.

For everything there is a season. I argue that our historical moment begs for the restoration of shared loves. We must not fail to meet this need. In my estimation, only an uplifting politics of solidarity can counter identity politics, which makes a dark promise of solidarity, one based on blood, chromosomes, and sexual appetites. In this historical moment, full of the confusion and danger that attend the collapse of a governing consensus, we need something more than liberalism. We need strong gods, purified by reason and subordinate to true religion but nevertheless powerful enough to win our hearts.

I have cryptically thanked Philip Rieff in my acknowledgements. I never met him, but as a young theological scholar I read his books. A brilliant sociologist, he despaired of the desacralization promoted by so-called critical reason, which he believed was leading us to an anti-culture, a third world of spiritual impoverishment heretofore unknown to men. And Rieff despaired over his despair. In his agony of unbelief, he pointed me toward a fundamental truth: It is more precious to love than to know.

Of course, the Bible says as much. Love of God is the first commandment, and as the First Letter of John teaches, Love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. As I have already noted, Plato strikes a similar note. I should not have needed Philip Rieff to guide me to such an obvious truth. But I did need him. He reasoned his way to the dark bottom of the postwar consensus, allowing me to see that the opposite of love is not hate but death, the placid cessation of aspiration and desire, the tempting void of nothingness.

The spasms of violence in the twentieth century rose to great heights, casting a long shadow over our moral and political ideals and even over our spiritual imaginations. The postwar consensus was originally modest. I would have supported the efforts of men like James B. Conant, and in fact I did in my younger days. But as it developed and became more and more rigid in its dogmatic openness, that consensus became an enemy of love.

I am more than sixty years old. The only society I have known is the one dominated by the postwar consensus. I am therefore a largely blind guide to whatever comes next. But of this I am sure: It will require a restoration of love. And love is roused by the strong gods, which is why they are returning.

R. R. Reno is editor ofFirst Things.

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Shared Loves and Strong Loyalties | R. R. Reno - First Things

SANTIAGO When millions of Chileans took to the streets in October 2019, after a small hike in transport fees quickly morphed into a national movement for political change, it seemed that Chiles populist moment had finally arrived. Alongside protesters demands for better healthcare and pensions were sentiments that populists around the world would recognize: A strong current of anti-elitism, demands for institutional change, and a mistrust of existing political parties. Yet one thing seemed to be missing: A strong and personalistic leader who could channel those populist inclinations and put them into practice.

That may now be changing. As Chiles November 21 election quickly approaches, the presidential race has been upended by the meteoric rise of the far-right Jos Antonio Kast, a former congressman once seen as a fringe candidate, but who now leads at least one major poll and is second in others. While polls suggest the Kast would lose in a runoff to leftist front-runner Gabriel Boric, the race has tightened substantially in recent weeks, according to Cadem. Behind Kasts rise: a backlash against politics as usual, strong rhetoric against immigrants, and his ability to channel the simmering anger of Chiles middle class. Indeed, he could be described as the true populist in the race.

Many observers had assumed a populist figure would come from the Chilean left. But Boric, a congressman who represents a coalition of forces that see themselves as representative of the spirit of the 2019 protests, has for the most part avoided descending into populism. He emphasizes the importance of respecting democratic institutions, and unlike many on the left, he is a vocal critic of the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Cuban regimes. He supported a November 2019 cross-party agreement aimed at rewriting Chiles constitution, something his Communist coalition partners rejected.

To be sure, there is a touch of populism in the campaigns fetishization of lo popular. And in a recent interview, Borics economic advisor admitted that a policy the candidate has supported (successive withdrawals from private pension funds) is bad public policy and terrible economics, but that hes doing something reasonable for someone whos in politics, which is to respond to what people want.

But does Boric really know what people want? The tattooed 35-year-old candidate is betting on Chile being as woke as he and his coalition buddies are. On a whole range of campaign issues, they engage in the language of todays progressive left. From foreign policy to education, his election platform promises to be feminist, green, anti-racist, participatory and decentralized. The constitutional convention has committed to gender neutral language and a rule forbidding denialism, which severely limits the scope of discussion. Those who deny, for example, that the 2019 protests involved systemic human rights abuses (an open question) could be subject to re-education programs (Article 45 of the Conventions Ethics Regulations states that the programs will be geared towards training in the area infringed, such as human rights, intercultural relations, gender equality, religious or spiritual diversity, or any other that is required).

Chiles efforts to make strides towards a more inclusive society should be applauded, especially if they avoid falling into us-vs-them populism or authoritarian efforts to reprogram offenders. Such efforts are also not especially unusual, as Chiles economic progress has pushed it closer towards the post-material attitudes common in Western democracies. For years now, polls have shown Chileans to be increasingly liberal on a range of values, and this is especially true among the young the kind of voters Boric hopes to attract.

However, while these values are common among highly educated young people, they are resisted by other sectors of society. Widespread access to tertiary education is relatively new in Chile, so a good part of the highly educated cohort in Chile is under 40. But many older, less educated or rural voters view progressive values not only as elitist but also morally objectionable, reflecting trends in other countries that have lurched toward populism, as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have noted.

And so it is that Kast has come to lead polls, four years after finishing fourth in the 2017 presidential race with just 8% of the votes. Since then, Kast founded his own party, the Republican Party, frustrated by what he saw as the failure of the right-wing UDI party to defend the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship with sufficient enthusiasm. In recent weeks he has supplanted the traditional rights chosen candidate Sebastin Sichel, who, with origins in the Christian Democratic Party, had hoped to capture disaffected centrist voters. He failed, and the traditional right returned to its natural candidate and political space: conservativism, corporatism and a dogged defense of Pinochets constitution.

But this is 2021, and this is not your grandparents pinochetismo. Kast criticizes immigration, downplays the demands of the countrys indigenous communities, and promises to combat gender ideology. His campaign promises measures to promote natural methods of contraception and to involve Christian churches in dealing with alcohol and drug addiction. On the international front, Kast, who is close to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, questions globalism and sees the United Nations as a tool of the left, often blaming it for Chiles immigration problem. He promises to withdraw Chile from the UN Human Rights Council. He also plans to build physical barriers between Chile and its northern neighbors. Kast, then, is a pretty good representative of the new, nationalist, populist right. And while not especially charismatic, he does seem to embody, far more than Boric, the anger and frustration of a middle class that feels represented neither by unresponsive parties and institutions, nor by the new, progressive Chile being celebrated in the constitutional convention.

Kasts success thus far shows that the assumptions about the 2019 protests have been, if not exactly wrong, then insufficient. More than a peaceful movement for political change, the protests were always more about anger and frustration and rejecting traditional political parties and leaderships. This why a constitutional agreement aimed at redesigning those institutions was understood to be the only way out at the time. And this is why the far right may be as close as the far left to capitalizing on the current political moment.

Funk is professor of political science at the University of Chile and a partner in Andes Risk Group, a political consultancy firm.

Any opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Americas Quarterly or its publishers.

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The Rise of Jos Antonio Kast in Chile - Americas Quarterly

Alliance deputy leader Stephen Farry once summed up Stormonts financial ideology as having two components: a left-wing spending policy alongside a right-wing taxation policy.

very problem was the fault of the Treasury not sending enough money for public services, while most politicians in Belfast boasted to constituents about how they had lowered their taxes.

The devolved administration set up after the 1998 Belfast Agreement was never designed to provide good government and some defenders of the Stormont experiment argued that in time politics would mature; having to make difficult decisions would force ministers to build cross-community alliances and to grapple with problems beyond the orange and green divide.

Such optimism has been unfulfilled. Devolution has now been back for almost two years, yet there is little evidence of any willingness to take unpopular decisions even when some politicians privately concede that they are necessary.

This week Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced his spending review a medium-term allocation of resources to public services which allows the devolved administrations to plan ahead. Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphys response demonstrated the shallowness of his thinking about the public finances. But in truth, his mindset is shared to varying degrees across much of the Assembly chamber and in parts of the civil service.

The chancellor announced that Stormont would receive its largest budget in history, with increased spending for every one of the next three years. By 2024, the Executives budget will have risen to 15.2bn. The government said this amounted to an additional 1.6bn a year on average over the three-year spending review period.

Those figures do not include Annually Managed Expenditure which sees roughly another 10bn sent to Northern Ireland to pay for things like pensions and social security. If Northern Ireland was an independent country, it would be bankrupt because there is a multi-billion pound shortfall between what is raised in tax and what is spent on public services.

But as far as Mr Murphy is concerned, this is no cause for thankfulness. The Sinn Fein veteran said the extra money was nowhere near what is required. He disputed the claims of a 1.6bn increase in the block grant, highlighting that this did not account for the vast Covid spending over the last year and a half.

In that, he had some justification the Treasury was using Stormonts pre-pandemic budget as its baseline. Like every government, the Executive is going to face enormous bills over coming years, some of which cannot yet be foreseen although last year the Executive was struggling to spend all the money which the Treasury sent to deal with Covid, and the pandemic has shown that if there is a crisis the Treasury will provide additional funds.

However, there is a more awkward truth for Mr Murphy and many within the Stormont system. They have the ability to act out their left-wing economic ideology, but they are declining to use that ability.

Sinn Fein has long complained that Stormont does not have enough tax-raising powers, and Mr Murphy has set up an inquiry to examine the case for further fiscal devolution.

Yet, despite seeing itself as in the same economic category as Castro and Chavez, there is scant evidence that Sinn Fein would use any additional tax-raising powers to tax the rich.

Indeed, the partys one big economic idea (parked for now) has been to devolve corporation tax so that it can slash taxes for the biggest corporations. To put into context how ideologically absurd that is for a socialist party, consider that this Tory chancellor is increasing corporation tax.

For years, Sinn Fein and the DUP boasted about the taxes they had spared the people of Northern Ireland. The regional rate had been frozen year after year, water charges had been blocked, there had been a cap on the rates which the wealthiest homeowners had to pay, and so on.

The cap on rates bills is an example of how economically conservative successive administrations led by the DUP and Sinn Fein have been.

A condition of the 2006 St Andrews Agreement was that there would be a cap on rates bills, set at half a million pounds meaning that anyone with a house worth more than that sum would not pay any extra in rates. Two years after the restoration of devolution in 2007, the cap was lowered to 400,000 and it has remained there ever since.

In simple terms, that means that the poorest ratepayers subsidise the bills of the most wealthy (who include among their number some Stormont ministers and senior civil servants). The most expensive house for sale in Northern Ireland is a huge five-bedroom mansion on Malone Park, valued at 2.5 million. Its annual rates bill is listed by the PropertyPal website as being just 3,187 a year.

That is the consequence not of decisions taken by Tories in London, but by DUP and Sinn Fein finance ministers, backed by the vast majority of MLAs.

Based on the current level of rates, removing that cap would bring in about 8 million a year equating to the salaries of about 300 nurses (or 65 First or deputy First Ministers).

Most of the Executive parties doggedly opposed water charges, presenting them as a cynical attempt to over-tax the poorest in society. Yet they have the chance to set the rules as they see fit. If they want to see redistribution of wealth an ideology to which Sinn Fein and the SDLP subscribe then charges could be set for those in the biggest houses. There are arguments against that, but to claim that the Executive has no ability to raise the money it claims to need is demonstrably false.

One of the few areas in which Stormont has used its powers to raise some of the money which it says it needs is through the carrier bag levy.

But the rate was set at a paltry level 5p a bag and has never been increased (Edwin Poots is considering increasing this to 20p a bag). If it wanted, the Executive could massively increase that charge, something which would not only bring in money, but would help to protect the environment.

Stormont is also on course to hand back hundreds of millions of pounds in money to subsidise renewable heat because of its bungling over RHI first making it too generous, now making it insufficiently generous in comparison with GB.

For every 100 spent per person on comparable public services in England, the Treasury calculates that 127 is spent in Northern Ireland. There is good reason for a region like Northern Ireland receiving more money almost every UK region raises less than it spends, reflecting the financial power of London. Other parts of the country contribute in other ways. Northern Ireland, for instance, is a major food producer.

The Treasury has poured money into the Executive. Almost every time there has been a political crisis, there has been a financial reward for the parties which caused that crisis. In line with that principle, last years New Decade, New Approach deal was accompanied by an additional 1bn.

Alliance is the only major party to have opposed this populism. I recall a very senior DUP figure coming up to me many years ago after a pre-election debate in which the then Alliance leader David Ford had set out his support for water charges. The politician was ecstatic, believing that this would undermine Alliance with voters who dont want to pay anything more.

But in some ways it was easier for Alliance to make those arguments when a vote for its candidates was not going to see such policies implemented. As it grows, that may no longer be the case, and there will be a test of the unresolved economic ideology of a party whose central focus is not economic.

Its easy to demand that London sends us more and more money, but its not grown-up politics and as the cash for ash scandal demonstrated, it can have perverse outcomes.

If we want a better health service, are we prepared to pay for it both financially and in terms of unpopular but necessary decisions about centralising some services away from small hospitals? No one enjoys paying tax, but lower taxes come at a cost.

However, higher taxes do not necessarily mean better public services. Boosting public spending ultimately means taking the money from the public; that can only work if the public trust that the money will be well spent.

Having been notorious for squander and incompetence, the Executive is not best placed to convince voters to give it more of their cash.

And yet, without ever taking the responsibility for raising more of the money which they say public services need, our politicians will remain infantile and our health service, our water infrastructure, our schools and myriad other aspects on which we depend will require ever greater reform and someone will have to pay for it.

Huey Long, the 1930s governor of Louisiana, once said: One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government and they arent going to like it.

One of the things which the DUP and Sinn Fein must worry about is this: If despite their relentless populism for 14 years, Stormont is deeply unpopular, how precarious would their positions be if they were to take unpopular decisions?

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Sam McBride: Childish populism at Stormont ultimately hurts the very voters they are trying to woo - Belfast Telegraph

Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 1

The Charanjit Singh Channi governments power-populism announcements will cost the cash-strapped Punjab Rs 4,966 crore. The latest reduction in power tariff by Rs 3 per unit for those having a load of up to 7 KW will put an additional burden of Rs 3,316 crore on the exchequer.

Also read:Punjab slashes power tariff by Rs 3 per unit

Poll play by parties

Release dues

It is good that people are getting relief, but what about PSPCL? We have a huge unpaid subsidy bill. Jasbir Singh Dhiman, PSEB

The big question is how Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) will manage its operations, considering the poor credit history it shares with the state government. For years now, the subsidy amount of any given year has been carried forward to the next fiscal.

Earlier, the Channi government announced a waiver of Rs 1,500 crore worth of pending bills of consumers having upto 2 KW load and also reduced the fixed charges on medium-scale industry by 50 percent, adding another subsidy of Rs 150 crore.

This fiscals power subsidy is Rs 10,668 crore, besides around Rs 7,000 crore of unpaid subsidy from the previous years. The government has to clear a subsidy of Rs 17,796 crore by March 2022. Eight months, the government is still to pay Rs 4,960 crore of subsidy to PSPCL.

As on November 1, it is paying Rs 600 crore a month as subsidy. As calculated at the time of the Budget, the government should be releasing Rs 1,483 crore each month to clear the subsidy bill. With the additional subsidy burden of nearly Rs 5,000 crore (this year, only Rs 2,083 crore will have to be paid from November to March, provided this is okayed by the Punjab State Electricity Regulatory Commission), the power subsidy burden is clearly becoming unbearable.

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Power tariff cut to put Rs5K cr burden - The Tribune

OPINION

One of the pitiful things happening in South Africa today, is that racists are emboldened once more to lead the discourse on racism!

Recently, the Democratic Alliance (DA) put up fancy posters around Phoenix to declare boldly that "The ANC called you racists. The DA calls you heroes." To be sure, there are multiple accounts of what happened in Phoenix during the July movement. For now, it is better to leave it to the police and other agencies to reveal the true facts to the nation. However, one article published by New Frame with the title "Past and present push Phoenix over edge" sheds some interesting insights about the complexity of life in Phoenix and the events of July 2021.

In a tragicomedy turn of events, the DA pulled down the posters after a national uproar against them. And then the next day, the same party proceeded to defend the posters. They did so through the mouths of Helen Zille, John Steenhuisen and DA "stalwart" Mike Waters, who allegedly wrote a letter to resign from the party's local government elections campaign in defense of the posters.

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In the township, such an "apology" or "withdrawal" is often described in this manner: "They say I must say I am sorry because you are offended. Kodwa oksalayo, sengishilo. Manje senijabulile?" (But what I have already said cannot be unsaid. Are you happy now?).

Last week, of course, Gareth Cliff added his piece to the puzzle of rising arrogant, racist and conservative right-wing movements that believe local government voters and South Africa as a whole should not be worried about the problem of racism. Of course, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is the basis of knowledge on racism for these sects and its studies come in handy for racists. It is these studies or surveys that have made the IRR launch campaigns such as "Racism is not the Problem" and earlier, #SaveTheOpposition, a code for DA.

In part, the rising racism and right-wing conservative politics and discourses are informed by the latest volumes of "scientific" studies and surveys from the IRR. But it is also interesting to observe that the further South Africa moves away from the 1994 moment and the honeymoon of the rainbow nation and towards the complex evolution of the democratic state and society, the more the racists become emboldened and abandon their pretense openly and without shame. It would seem that the so-called fight back movement is back in full swing!

Part of this racist and conservative discourse is a well-orchestrated strategy to delink national issues from local ones. This is a false delinking and very much unscientific. There is a reason why the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), for example, has chosen the campaign slogan: "Land and jobs. Manje!"

So, what does the evidence and data say about national issues as determinants of voter behaviour in local government elections? And why is the DA acting so desperately?

Survey after survey proves that even during local government elections, the biggest issues that concern the voters are jobs, crime, corruption, and local government services. You can pick any elections study or survey; it will have these as high-ranking issues. It is self-evident that voters see the local and national issues as intersectional rather than separate.

Another example is Herman Mashaba of Action SA's conservative campaign. He is using the local and national, as well as the global, issue of migration to get Joburgers to vote for him. Why? Because right or wrong, he understands the intersectionality of migration politics with local experiences of the people. Despite his lofty promises, Mashaba knows he will have no authority to change migration policies as a councillor.

And so, the return of racist and populist conservative politics work for the DA and similar parties. Remember, the DA has suffered at two levels recently: firstly, the strategy of appeasing the black community through a black leadership did not work. The excuse was that this failed strategy was encouraging race-based politics, something that belongs to the ANC and not the "liberal" DA. The real reason is that the strategy had alienated some sections of the white electoral base of the party.

Secondly, the DA suffered a double defeat in the 2019 general elections by dropping 2% under Maimane and losing to the ANC, which was led by Cyril Ramaphosa (and not Jacob Zuma, who was easy to attack). In 2018, Tony Leon acknowledged this as much when he reportedly said: "Cyril Ramaphosas election has been a game changer for everyone, for the country, for our economic fortunes, and indeed the DA will have to up its game because Ramaphosa is a very different proposition."

The DA's 2% loss became a gain for the Vryheid Front Plus (VF+) which moved from 0.9% in 2014 to 2.38% in 2019. This means that VF+ ate from the DA's base, hence the 2% decline. Partly, this is what accounted for Maimane's dramatic departure, Steenhuisen's election of and the return of the poster child, Zille.

In 2014, Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection analysed voting trends by drilling down to the voting district. The analysis produced very fascinating but generally accepted truths. The evidence showed "the continued saliency of race in South African society. The phenomenon is further demonstrated by the general voting patterns. Minorities have largely gone for the DA, while Africans have largely remained with the ANC." The analysis concluded that the death or decline of other white opposition parties meant that the white vote had steadily consolidated under the DA since 1994.

In 2016, the fortunes of the DA did not change significantly in real terms either. Rather, it is the ANCs declining fortunes that saw the DA gain percentage advantages through a higher voter turnout, while the ANC voter stayed away. DAs marginal gains in the black community were insignificant for the bigger picture of electoral shifts. The truth is that the DA has reached an electoral ceiling in South Africa and its slide in 2019 meant that it must retreat to the racial laager once more. The intra-party instability, the return of its poster child and the racist rhetoric is a populist attempt to regain the support of the conservative white voter.

Well, only 1 November will tell if the DA has managed to shed its temporary blackness and get the love back from its traditional base.

One thing is for sure: there is a dangerous racist and populist right-wing resurgence in South Africa and the DA seems to be playing into that kind of gallery. It is in this context that the non-apologetic apology on the DA Phoenix posters must be understood.

In a recent debate on the local government elections that I had with Tony Leon, for example, he accepted that "identity", code for "race", remains one of the key determinants of electoral outcomes in South Africa. This reality will not change in the foreseeable future.

Therefore, the DA's political quagmire is far deeper than the poster. It is about a love relationship between the DA and its traditional narrow base, which was beginning to sour. The love affair was somewhat messed up by Zille who later felt she must return to fix her own mess after promoting black leadership, something the traditional base rejected in 2019. Hence the return of the poster child. And like the prodigal son, the DA has effectively chosen to drop all the pretense and takes a leaf out of the gospel of race(ism), liberalism and politics - RW Johnson's book!

It is truly unscientific and dishonest to think that race or other national issues do not have a bearing on electoral choices of the voter, simply because this is a local government election. The DA itself campaigned through attacking Zuma while he was president in 2016, even though he was never a ward candidate. Even ActionSA and the EFF are using national issues such a migration and jobs respectively to solicit votes.

May we all enjoy the final period of the spectacle of politics and live to see 2 November. In the meantime, do not allow deceptive rhetoric to mislead you into thinking that local and national issues do not intersect - they do. In fact, the unlink rhetoric is a feeble ploy to defocus the public from serious discourses about the political settlement and the unguided national drift to nowhere! Wake up. Vukani! While at it, beware of the boldness of racism!

I apologise for telling the truth. Oksalayo sengishilo! Happy voting to all!

David Maimela is a political analyst. He writes in his personal capacity.

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DAVID MAIMELA: The DA, populism and the return of its poster child - Eyewitness News

CW: Violence and murder

On the afternoon of October 15th, Leigh-on-Sea was shaken by the tragic stabbing and murder of Sir David Amess.Widely regarded as one of Westminsters most admired and dedicated MPs, the outpouring of grief from across the political spectrum was profound.The ramifications of this tragedy stretch far beyond the borders of Amess Essex constituency, and after the second murder of a British MP in five years, now is the moment to reflect on how and why the rise of populism and the subsequent polarisation of politics has changed the way we treat our public servants.

Jo Coxs murder in Leeds in June 2016 shocked the nation.For the first time since the 1990s, when Ian Gow was killed by the IRA, a sitting British MP was brutally murdered for doing their job.There were 26 years between those two tragic incidents, and now British politics is left facing the second deadly attack in five years. But what steps can we possibly take to ensure that this violence ends?

There was a lot of talk across news networks and in newspapers on the following day about increased security, changes to the way in which MPs do their jobs, and upping spending on personal protection in the name of preserving democracy.In reality, the problem is far larger and harder to solve.In the last ten years, the rise of populism has seen politics become more divided, more aggressive, and ultimately more violent than ever before.

It is important to remember that this is not simply a UK problem. Donald Trumps election in 2016 marked a turning point in American and global politics alike. The success of populism helped by a rise in the use and exploitation of social media for political gain.The Capitol riots earlier this year serve as yet another reminder of how dramatically things have changed in such a short space of time: just a few years ago the idea of the US President defying the democratic process and calling on his supporters to take the country back by marching on the symbolic home of American free speech would have been impossible to comprehend.

That climate of hatred, created in the build-up to the 2016 presidential elections in the United States, has spread far and wide and it is perhaps only now that here in the UK we are seeing the true ramifications of how things have altered in our sphere.The Brexit referendum and Trumps victorious campaign have been compared many times: both used social media to give a platform to lies and exaggerations, both captured the minds of a section of society that had been ignored and underinvested in for far too long, but most importantly, both fuelled division and hatred.The goalposts moved for what was acceptable in British politics in 2016, and they havent moved back.Huge numbers of MPs today have been forced to install panic alarms and security cameras in their homes and offices in an effort to protect staff, family, and friends.These days you will struggle to find a democratically elected official who doesnt regularly receive online hate and even death threats.

The question of how to reverse the situation is a very difficult one to answer.Suggestions in recent days have often focussed on the removal of anonymity on social media.Problems exist here too:on a basic level there are plenty of platforms, such as Facebook, where anonymity doesnt exist, and people are still happy to spout abuse and hatred.Radicalisation is almost impossible to stop in person, never mind online.Beyond that, the ability to remain anonymous is also key to allowing whistle-blowers and healthy critics to come forward and voice their political opinions without fear of consequences.What the country needs is a change in tone at the very top of politics, a change from the rhetoric of hate and division and a shift back towards healthy debate.

So, what next?Where do we go from here?It is all too easy for lawmakers to sit down in interviews and call for more stringent regulation of social media and put money aside for investment in personal protection.The truth is that the change we need is far more profound.We must return to a discourse of respect and understanding.British politics is characterised by the passionate and vocal defence of our personal beliefs, something very different to the violence and division often inspired by the leaders and politicians of today.The line has been crossed now we must go back before its too late.

Image Credits: Richard Townshend / CC BY 3.0

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The Murder of David Amess must change the way we look at politics - Cherwell Online

In April 2000, I travelled to Dhaka with a formidable battery of my talented lieutenants from my internet venture CricketNext.com. The occasion was indeed historic. The International Cricket Council (ICC) had curated an extraordinary contest; the worlds first Asia XI versus Rest of World XI ODI. The Kargil betrayal was indeed fresh in most minds, but in an unparalleled happenstance, Pakistani and Indian players were playing on the same side. The worlds wiliest left-arm genius Wasim Akram was the captain of the Asia XI, and playing under him were Indias legends, such as Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Ajay Jadeja etc.

As someone said to me, It is surreal seeing the two neighbours who had a nasty military conflict less than a year earlier, play like a bunch of school-mates, as one collective unit (the gargantuan trolling of Indian fast bowler Mohammed Shami by right-wing zealots after Indias defeat to Pakistan in the T20 World Cup, 2021 is another story altogether).

Dhaka appeared like any capital city in South Asia; brimming with staggering aplomb, its tilted demography favouring strapping youngsters who vociferously screamed for Tendulkar, its main street a crowded marmalade, reflecting a country in a chaotic state of profligate frenzy. They welcomed us with unbridled love. They loved their cricket. They clearly idolised their Big Brother to their west, the one that had valiantly in 1971, helped give them their unique identity. Thus, when I saw the deadly attacks on Hindus in a systematic, organised manner, I was perturbed. Some things had clearly changed. After all, it has been almost two decades since that public bonhomie.

Communal template

There were over half-a-dozen Hindus killed in a brutal programme of religious targeting in Bangladesh. ISKCON has been singled out too, as per reports. As is the usual communal template, the conflagration happened at the time of an annual religious festival; this time it was the Durga Puja. The trigger for the violent aggression was a social media post that allegedly ridiculed the Koran.

The fact that cannot be denied is the tinder-box circumstance in which several societies exist today, especially those in our neighbourhood. It takes one WhatsApp instigation to create social unrest and bloodletting. Years of peaceful camaraderie can be incinerated, like their burnt homes. Hindus are a small minority of 10 per cent in Bangladesh, which has also been experiencing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, as the former East Pakistan grapples with local extremism.

In the age of social media, it takes little to influence impressionable minds. While Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has reacted promptly, demonstrating her commitment to its secular composition, it is quite likely that the aftermath of the mayhem will linger much longer. This is unlikely to slow up overnight. Back home in India, one can already see that some of Indias ruling party cheerleaders are upping the communal temperature by reigniting a divisive debate. This hardly portends well.

Voices of outrage

On a TV show, the BJP spokesperson screamed loudly about why the opposition parties were playing minority-appeasement politics in opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the Modi government in 2019. It was palpable that the BJP would once again raise the outside infiltrators story as crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand draw closer. Expect the termites disdain to return to the mainstream. But this was being disingenuous to say the least.

For one, until the coronavirus pathogen suddenly hit India in March 2020, the country was witnessing nation-wide large, spontaneous uprisings against the brazenly discriminatory law that disallowed Muslims refugees persecuted in their home countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh) from getting sanctuary in India. Coupled with the nation-wide NRC and NPR, it was a deadly triumvirate to disenfranchise Indias largest minority population. The apprehensions were genuine. Detention centres for illegal migrants were going to be the next big infrastructure project. Polarised politics is BJPs coveted meal menu. It works magically at the hustings. Bangladesh appears to be following the same political business model.

Majoritarian populism

As the highly reprehensible attacks on Hindus show, Bangladesh could be following the recent global trend of rising majoritarian populism. Eventually, it is self-defeating. A few years ago, The Economist, considered a free-market torchbearer, had shortlisted Bangladesh among the countries of the year for its burgeoning exports, trade liberalisation, improved transparency and poverty alleviation. Bangladesh is the worlds second largest in garment merchandise exports. For four years in a row, pre-2020, GDP growth exceeded seven per cent, helping it to outperform its two bigger benchmarks, Pakistan and India.

On crucial human development indicators such as education access, infant mortality, primary healthcare, womens participation in the workforce etc. Bangladesh has registered a robust turnaround. Thus, if PM Sheikh Hasina allows sectarianism to spread, it will come at a huge social consequence and economic cost. No country can get away with manufactured social disunity for short-term political aggrandisement. It gets you. Finally.

Radicalism is the bane of fragile democracies that are also battling economic inequalities and social tensions. Nativism is retrograde even if in the short-term, it pays handsome electoral dividends. Bangladesh needs to be watchful here. It is easy for a country to lose the plot, just as a cricket team can suddenly find itself with an impossible asking rate. A civilised society is one that safeguards its minorities. When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became president in 1971, he had inspired millions with his sincere message of a secular Bangladesh. His daughter now needs to walk the talk.

The author is former spokesperson of the Congress party

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Attacks on Hindus: Bangladesh could be following the recent global trend of rising majoritarian populism, - Free Press Journal

Suketu Mehta spoke on how journalists can bridge communication between urban planners and citizens.

Jasmine Su 12:33 am, Nov 01, 2021

Contributing Reporter

Non-fiction writer and journalist Suketu Mehta spoke on Thursday about the role of writing in urban studies as part of the Universitys Introduction to Urban Studies course.

Suketu Mehta is an associate professor of journalism at New York University and writes extensively about immigration and urban development. The talk on Thursday, titled The Secret Lives of Cities, was sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism and hosted by architecture professor Elihu Rubin 99, who teaches Introduction to Urban Studies. The course is a series of lectures made by Yale faculty and external speakers, all from different academic disciplines, on their methods of urban studies.

So much of the conversation in urban planning is buildings talking to buildings, and they forget that there are human beings living inside and underneath these buildings, Mehta said during the talk. So where I come in is I can speak to people who are doing the planning I understand what they want to convey, and then I can render it into a story for the average educated reader.

Mehta added that far too often, urban plans are thrust down the throats of citizens, serving the interests of real estate developers as opposed to the people. This is why communication between storytellers and urban planners is crucial for cities, according to Mehta.

He gave the example of the Hudson Yards development in New York City, citing that it was designed to remind people of their poverty. Mehta said that very few consultations were made with New Yorkers about the development, and that the 7 train was extended to serve the development, making it one of the most expensive mass transit developments in New York City. This extension for Hudson Yards occurred despite ongoing needs for the trains to be extended to outer boroughs of the city, Mehta added.

The Hudson Yards development includes luxury condominiums, malls and the Vessel, a 16-story structure of staircases.

The narrative of what makes for a good city has been taken too much towards luxury condominiums and skyscraper office buildings, as if money is the only thing that a city needs, Mehta said. Its not, actually. Too many rich people coming into a city can destroy as effectively as too many poor people coming into the city.

The problem with cities today, according to Mehta, is that there is a disconnect in narration. He explained that on the one hand, there is an official narrative from urban planners and real estate developers about what a city should be. On the other hand, he continued, there are also unofficial, little stories about the people who live in those cities. A journalists job is to tell the unofficial narrative, Mehta said.

Mehta added that a journalists storytelling ability is especially important given the rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Vladmir Putin.

There is a global war of storytelling going on right now, Mehta said. A populist is basically a gifted storyteller, like the real estate companies that advertised Hudson Yards as the gleaming symbol of New York. They are gifted at telling a false story well. The only way a populist can be fought is by telling a true story back at it, a fact-checked story back at it. And thats where journalists and writers come in. We can tell a true story better.

Journalists and writers ability to tell a true story is the reason why supporters of populist leaders fear them, according to Mehta.

The rise of populism also has deep roots in urbanization and immigration, he said. Cities, being cosmopolitan and diverse, are deeply threatening to people who enjoy individualism and small-like minded communities. The urban-rural tension gives rise to support for populism in the countryside, according to Mehta.

I think Suketus idea of locating the urban-rural divide at the core of the recent resurgence in far-right populism significantly raises the stakes of our conversations about urban issues, Tyler Lutz GRD 21 who joined the talk via Zoom, told the News.

Anoushka Ramkumar 23, a student in Rubins class, said that she was fascinated by Mehtas idea of immigration as reparation, or the view that immigration is a way to fight centuries of colonization and oppression.

Ramkumar said that she bought Mehtas book on immigration after the talk to learn more.

Mehtas book about Mumbai, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, was a Pulitzer prize finalist in 2005.

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Pulitzer prize finalist speaks on the role of writing in urban development - Yale Daily News

Welfare initiatives embody civil rights, whereas freebies cultivate a patron-client syndrome

A neoliberal economy encourages private capital and the market, while forcing the state to withdraw from welfare. The state is limited in taking concrete and constructive efforts to fulfil the aspirations of the people. Even as the poor perceive the state as an arbitrator of their well-being and a facilitator for their mobility in all spheres of life, todays political parties resort to unsolicited freebies to attract them. The line between welfarism and populism has blurred.

Welfare initiatives include a targeted Public Distribution System, providing social security for labourers, quality education, fair employment, affordable healthcare, decent housing, and protection from exploitation and violence. Freebies, on the other hand, are provided to attract voters to cast their vote in a particular election. They create limited private benefit for the receiver and do not contribute towards strengthening public goods/facilities.

The culture of freebies in Tamil Nadu was started during the 1967 Assembly elections. The then Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) chief C.N. Annadurai offered three measures of rice for 1. The practice of providing freebies was followed by subsequent Chief Ministers of both the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), who promised free TV sets, free laptops to students, free rides for women in buses, free gas cylinders and stoves, a goat and a cow for poor farmers, and so on.

Initially, the government attempted to strengthen the redistribution of resources for all. After the 1990s, Dravidian parties moved towards clientelism, narrowly focussing on electoral gains. A study by Shroff, Kumar and Reich (2015) on the DMKs health insurance scheme demonstrated that the main beneficiaries were the partys core supporters and swing voters who could be influenced easily. Worse, after 2009, fewer people accessed public health care centres.

In 2021, however, there was a qualitative difference in the manifesto of the DMK, which avoided most of the freebies except tablet devices to students studying in higher secondary schools and colleges. The manifesto reflected more of a programmatic policy intervention towards better public services than narrow private benefits in the form of freebies. But both the DMK and the AIADMK were silent on land distribution and enhancing budgetary allocation for maintenance of public infrastructure like schools, colleges, hostels and hospitals. The GSDP share for health was better under AIADMK rule compared to DMK rule, but both were below 1.5%. Tamil Nadus 2021-22 Budget shows that it has allocated around 13.3% of its total expenditure for education, which is lower than average allocation for education by all States, which is 15.8%.

When Senior Counsel Arvind P. Datar submitted his arguments in S. Subramaniam Balaji v. Govt. of Tamil Nadu (2013), which challenged the freebies of both the DMK government in 2006 and AIADMK government in 2011, he emphasised that freebies violate the constitutional mandate of extending benefits for public purpose and instead create private benefits. He asserted that the literacy rate in Tamil Nadu was around 73% and there were 234 habitations across the State with no school access whatsoever, and distribution of free consumer goods to the people having ration cards cannot be justified as public purpose. Further, distributing laptops does not serve the purpose of increasing the quality of education. According to a report by Anaivarukkum Kalvi Iyakkam (Sarva Siksha Abhiyan) in 2019, there were 3,003 government schools attended by less than 15 students. Due to lack of proper infrastructure facilities and specialised teachers, parents prefer to move their students to private schools. According to a report in this newspaper in 2019, more than 1,500 hostels for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) were in a dilapidated condition. Hence, freebies will not only depoliticise the poor and marginalised communities but also indirectly deny them their due share of state resources. Freebies drastically widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Populism encourages mediocre political critics and erases critical and rational thinking, which are important to raise pertinent questions to people in power.

Compared to other States, Tamil Nadu has made impressive strides in many development indicators such as education, healthcare (mortality rate and life expectancy) and infrastructure facilities. However, it lags behind in other aspects. According to the Tamil Nadu State Agricultural Departments publication, Salient Statistics on Agriculture, 2019, SCs, who constitute nearly 20% of Tamil Nadus population, accounted for 10% of agricultural landowners and possessed 7.8% of the farmland in the State. Even though the literacy rate is high in Tamil Nadu, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-4 (2015-16), only 32% of women aged 15-49 had completed 12 or more years of schooling, compared with 38% of men. The NFHS-4 showed sharp differences between SCs and Other Backward Classes in Tamil Nadu. The neonatal mortality was 12.3 for OBCs, but 17.4 for SCs. Infant mortality was 18.4 for OBCs but 23.6 for SCs. And under-five mortality was 24.8 for OBCs and 31 for SCs. The data reflect inequal access to public health infrastructure.

According to a paper by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, Explaining the contractualisation of Indias workforce (2019), the share of contract workers in Tamil Nadu increased sharply from 8.3% in 2000-01 to 20.17% in 2013-14, which shows the withdrawal of the state in providing social security, and leaving the workforce at the mercy of neoliberal market forces.

Theoretically, there is a qualitative distinction between being subjects in an authoritarian regime and being citizens in a democratic polity. Unsolicited freebies cultivate a patron-client syndrome and encourage personality cults in a democratic polity. Besides, they affect the critical faculties of citizens, particularly the poor and the marginalised. Providing freebies is to treat people like subjects, whereas citizens are entitled to constitutional guarantees. Welfare initiatives are an embodiment of civil rights, whereas unsolicited freebies show benevolence at best and apathy at worst towards the poor by the ruling parties.

Also read | Have freebies and bribes depoliticised voters?

There was a positive indication that the DMK is reconsidering unsolicited freebies/populism when it tabled a White Paper on the States Finances in the Assembly recently. Thereafter, there has been a lot of public discussion on this issue, which may lead to a reorientation of public policy in a healthy direction. Political parties and civil society should consider quality aspects in education, healthcare and employment and ensure fair distribution and redistribution of resources for the marginalised communities. We draw the publics attention and debate to the dichotomy between welfare and unsolicited freebies or populism, so that the constitutional ideal of a secular, egalitarian and democratic India can be realised.

C. Lakshmanan is Associate Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Dalit Intellectual Collective, and Venkatanarayanan S. teaches at Christ University, Bengaluru

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The need to move away from clientelism - The Hindu

To be facetious about it, they only have 12 days to save the Earth. As politicians and officials from 197 countries begin just under a fortnights work at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, you can sense a strange mixture of feelings: expectation, cynicism, fatalism, anger and fragile hope.

It will be easy to lose track of what is at stake and who is who although anyone feeling confused should recall the report issued in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its bracing conclusion: that huge environmental changes triggered by global heating are now everywhere, and avoiding a future that will be completely catastrophic demands immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in carbon emissions. The point is simple enough. But one familiar factor may well weaken the resolve of the key people at Cop26: the fact that too few politicians will arrive in Scotland bearing any mandate for serious climate action, because almost none of them have tried to get one.

Two crucial political problems define the contrast between what is required and what those in power have so far chosen to deliver. One centres on the populism and power cults that actively get in the way of climate action something evident in both the records of strongmen like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Brazils Jair Bolsonaro and Turkeys Recep Erdoan, and where our ecological emergency sits in the cultural and generational conflicts that are now bubbling up all over the world.

In the UK, the latest manifestation of the populist rights belligerent scepticism is the suggestion that we might rerun the Brexit referendum in the form of a vote on whether or not to pursue the goal of net zero carbon emissions. You also see it in those seemingly daily video clips of some or other sub-Alan Partridge TV or radio host arguing with someone from Extinction Rebellion or Insulate Britain, a ritual which feels like a new national sport.

The other impediment to action is more insidious. On both the centre-left and centre-right, there is superficial recognition of the hard yards required to do something about the climate emergency but, so far, an aversion to thinking about the huge changes to everyday life that will be necessary. We can build back greener without so much as a hair shirt in sight, says Boris Johnson.

Keir Starmer may not have uttered anything so crass, but he too seems to believe in a modest utopia of a new green economy, insulated homes, increased funding for science, and the day somehow being saved by British derring-do. Climate change is about jobs, he insists, which is partly true. But, like Johnson, he doesnt mention revolutionising what we eat and why and how we travel, or God forbid the continuing fetishisation of economic growth.

Might that be an inevitable feature of democracy? Perhaps. But in the UK, the first focus of blame should be the two-party Westminster model of politics kept in business by our stupid electoral system, and the way that it sustains political philosophies that ought to have been left behind in the 20th century.

On the right, notwithstanding Johnsons swerve into the politics of big spending and economic interventionism, Toryism remains beholden to the market, and dead against the idea of the common good shaping the lifestyles of anyone who is halfway affluent (the poor, of course, are fair game). Its contorted priorities are illustrated by the fact that the governments current leading lights managed to take us out of the European Union at a huge cost to national income and the countrys economic future. But they cannot muster anything like the same enthusiasm for risking some stability and prosperity in the interests of saving the planet.

And Labour? Here is a radical thought: given his beleaguered position and the urgency of the crisis, Starmer could conceivably go for broke, and predicate his leadership on the climate emergency, finally bringing its scale and urgency somewhere close to the heart of politics. The thought, unfortunately, would not even occur, because of what the Labour party is. Its origins lie in a world of coalmines and smokestacks. Like its sister social-democratic parties in Europe, whatever reinventions Labour has undergone since, it has a deep, sentimental attachment to an idea of the good life centred on work and the factory, and raising peoples living standards so that they can consume with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. At the most basic level, it shares the Tory idea that growth is the sine qua non of economic policy.

During the Corbyn years, some of this stuff was undoubtedly shaken up, although there were also signs of a conservatism that still runs across all wings of the party. In 2015, as he ran for the leadership, Jeremy Corbyn endorsed reopening mines in south Wales. Four years later, as Labour decisively embraced a so-called Green New Deal in preparation for the 2019 election, some of the big unions who represent gas, oil, and aviation workers insisted on 2030 being a target for significant progress rather than a non-negotiable net zero deadline.

It is worth remembering the view of the then leader of the GMB union, Tim Roache: the latter stance, he raged, would mean within a decade peoples petrol cars being confiscated. This will mean families can only take one flight every five years. Net zero carbon emissions by 2030 is utterly unachievable.

So, which way out? As a means of at least trying to reorientate our politics, a lot more people are going to have to vote for the Green party and, to maintain the sense of last-ditch urgency that Extinction Rebellion have brought to things, the case for what some people call extra-parliamentary activity feels beyond argument. Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, the most likely outcome of all the negotiations and diplomatic theatre in Glasgow will push even more people in that direction, and their protests will bring on the usual sneers and priggishness, not least from Westminster politicians. But as ever, the people involved will have a simple answer: that if politics endlessly fails, the streets may be all you have left.

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Politicians talk about net zero but not the sacrifices we must make to get there - The Guardian

Feeling optimistic about the state of American politics is hard. The country is deeply polarized. Much of the debate consists of name-calling and demonization. Dissatisfied with a strategy of maximal obstructionism in Congress, Republicans in state houses are trying to make subverting the outcome of the next election easier.

But we cant forget how much worse things could be right nowand what a major achievement it was for Joe Biden to have defeated Donald Trump. America booted an authoritarian populist from office in a free and fair election at the conclusion of his first term.

For those who are interested in the fate of liberal democracy around the world, that triumph raises a key question: Was Trumps loss an aberration owed to specifically American factors? Or did it portend the beginning of a more difficult period for authoritarian populists around the worldone in which they might be held accountable for their many mistakes and misdeeds?

You could make the case for a pessimistic answer. In some countries, such as the Philippines, authoritarian leaders remain highly popular among voters. In others, such as Peru, the populist wave is just now coming ashore. And even in the United States, it is plausible that extremist leaders who have recently been ousted may soon stage a comebackTrump is widely believed to be interested in running for the presidency in 2024, and the Republican Party seems to be growing more extreme by the day.

But you could also make the case for optimism. Recent developments in Europe and Latin America suggest that some of the populists and antidemocratic leaders who have dominated the political landscape for the past decade might finally be encountering serious trouble. If the picture looked almost unremittingly bleak a few years ago, now distinct patches of hope are on the horizon.

Read: The autocrats legacy

Take Germany. When the far-right Alternative for Germany first presented itself in national elections, in 2013, it fell just short of the 5 percent of the national vote it required to enter Parliament. Four years later, the party more than doubled its support, taking 13 percent of the national vote. If that rate of growth were to continue, the AfD would become the countrys largest party in elections this fall.

But as they say in financial markets, assuming that past performance is indicative of future results is a mistake. Far from continuing its rapid rise, the AfD is now losing popular support for the first time in its short history. Some polls suggest that the party may fall back to single-digit support in the September election. Even after Angela Merkel, Germanys long-serving head of government, leaves office, there is little immediate reason to fear for the stability of German democracy.

The situation in neighboring France looks more precarious. Like his three predecessors, President Emmanuel Macron has quickly become unpopular, and the countrys traditional parties are sad shadows of their former selves. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, who has long aspired to step into the void, should be in a strong position: Only about 52 percent of French voters prefer Macron to Le Pen, according to some recent polls.

Yet recent regional electionswidely seen as a preview of next years presidential racehave suggested that her position is weaker than many feared. Le Pen failed to win power in a single region, and the traditional parties, whose death has so often been prognosticated, were the ones that showed surprising signs of electoral resilience. For now, the defensive bulwark against Le Pen seems to be holding.

Other long-established democracies in Western and Northern Europe have also seen populists lose momentum. Sizable populist movements won parliamentary seats in Denmark, Sweden, Greece, and the Netherlands. In all of these countries, these movements will likely remain part of politics for the foreseeable future. But in all of them, they have also, for now, ceased to grow.

Anne Applebaum: The disturbing new hybrid of democracy and autocracy

Extremist leaders remain in power in some of the worlds most populous democracies. But even some of those strongmen are now starting to face a real reversal of fortune.

Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain known for his extremist rhetoric and open nostalgia for Brazils departed military dictatorship, unexpectedly assumed the countrys presidency in 2019. But he is now in deep political trouble. Lacking loyal allies in the countrys Congress, Bolsonaro has so far proved unable to concentrate power and, thanks to his disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his popularity has plummeted. Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, a former president better known simply as Lula, is likely to beat Bolsonaro in an upcoming election.

Extremist politicians in other Latin American countries are also doing poorly. Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, a left-wing populist, won Mexicos presidency by making big promises about economic redistribution and an end to corruption. Even before the coronavirus hit, his government had failed to deliver. Then his mishandling of the pandemica deadly mix of complacency and denialism that was strikingly similar to that of Lpez Obradors nominal ideological adversaries, Trump and Bolsonarofurther dented his popularity. In congressional elections in 2018, Lpez Obradors party won a crushing majority. In elections last month, it bled nearly 20 percent of its support. While Lpez Obradors party retains a nominal majority in Congress thanks to the support of two smaller allies, his ability to pass controversial legislation has been significantly curtailed.

Even some authoritarian populists who had long since seemed to consolidate their power now face some difficulty. Narendra Modi, Indias prime minister, has recently suffered painful setbacks in important state elections. Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoan has grown highly unpopular amid a deep financial crisis. Though both are likely to remain in the saddle for the foreseeable future, their electoral stars are not shining quite as brightly as they did a few years ago.

Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Hungary, a country that, despite its relatively small population, holds special significance for scholars of authoritarian populism. Before Viktor Orbn concentrated immense power in his own hands, many political scientists thought that Hungarys democratic institutions had consolidated, meaning that they should have been able to weather serious crises without much damage. But because of Orbns assault on independent institutions, Freedom House, the prodemocracy NGO, has found that the country is no longer fully freea historic first for a member state of the European Union.

But now, the opposition is finally getting its act together. After years during which Orbns control over the media, judiciary, and electoral commission left him with little effective resistance, opinion polls for next years parliamentary elections suggest that a broad ideological alliance is running neck and neck with his ruling party. If the united opposition ekes out a majority despite competing on an uneven playing field, the moment will be decisive for Hungarian democracy: Orbn will need to decide whether to ignore the outcome of the election, turning himself into an outright dictator, or give up the office on which he seemed to have such a firm hold just a few months ago.

Read: The populists finally breaking with Trump

It is far too early to declare that we have reached peak populism.

The coming years could well turn out to be even worse for liberal democracies around the world. By 2025, France and the United States might plausibly be ruled by Le Pen and Trump (or one of his family members), respectively. Modi and Erdoan will likely still be in office. Countries that are now governed by moderates could have new populist leaders of their own. This is hardly the time to stop sounding the alarm.

And yet, there is, for the first time in years, real evidence for the more optimistic scenario.

At the beginning of the populist rise, a new crop of political leaders made huge promises to voters and lacked a record on which they could be judged. But after winning power, they have largely failed to live up to their promises and bungled the handling of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Voters in many countries have thus started to grow disenchanted. Though populists usually retain a fervent following, their ability to build support from a broad cross section of voters seems to be rapidly fading in many countries.

The ability of mainstream parties to compete with populists has also improved. In many places, traditional parties had failed to realize how angry their own voters had become, and to what extent their policies were out of keeping with the preferences of the majority. Some have since corrected course, showing that they can beat populists at the ballot box if they steadfastly oppose extremism and take the grievances of ordinary voters seriously.

In a joke beloved by the writer David Foster Wallace, an old fish greets two young fish. Hows the water this morning? he asks them. Once the young fish are out of the old fishs earshot, they turn to the other. What the hell is water? one asks. The moral of the joke is obvious: We often become so accustomed to our environment that we start to take it for granted.

The rules and norms that sustain liberal democracies are similar. In good times, most voters dont care about who sits on the electoral commission or regulates the media. But when authoritarian leaders stack those institutions with loyalists, banning popular candidates or shutting down independent television stations, voters start to pay attention.

In many countries around the world, the past few years have been a crash course in the importance of the water were swimming in. And though the future remains highly uncertain, we have good reason to hope that people are more willing to fight for its preservation. Authoritarian populists remain a serious threat to the future of liberal democracy around the world. But the democratic fight back has begun in earnest.

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We Might Have Reached Peak Populism - The Atlantic

By Federico Finchelstein / Special To The Washington Post

A key difference between populism and fascism is that, for populists, actual electoral results matter. In contrast, fascism implies permanent power, irrespective of the ballot box. Populism affirms the authoritarian idea that one person can fully personify the people and the nation; but it must be confirmed via electoral procedures.

Whereas fascism has reveled in lies, populism has respected the truth of the ballot box. This doesnt mean it always advances democracy; indeed it frequently manipulates it. But it still derives power and depends on the integrity of the electoral system. That is why populist leaders have long recognized the value of respecting electoral results, even if they came out on the losing end of the democratic process.

But this distinction is beginning to fade. In this sense, Donald Trump has been a trailblazer for global autocrats. Especially in his denial of the elections results and embrace of the big lie about voter fraud, former president Trump represents a historical turning point in populist politics, enabling and inspiring others; just like fascist dictators before him.

Consider the case of Juan Pern and Peronism, the movement he created in Argentina.

Pern was the strongman in a military junta dictatorship that ruled from 1943 through 1946. Despite coming to power by force, in 1943, Pern encouraged and participated in free democratic elections in 1946.

After the global defeat of fascism at the end of the Second World War, fascism, coups and military dictatorships had become toxic. So former fascists and militants of dictatorships tried to regain power through democratic electoral means.

In the early postwar period, politicians like Pern understood that elections provided a critical source of political legitimacy. He ran on a populist ticket that put forward a third-way position beyond capitalism and communism. He won the 1946 presidential election, becoming the first populist leader in history to come to power.

Peronist populism borrowed elements of fascism. It was anti-liberal and created a messianic cult of leadership. It denounced the ruling elites, thwarted independent journalism and advanced a deep dislike for pluralism and political tolerance. But Pern was popularly elected, and thus distinct from fascists.

Like Pern, other Latin American populists in countries like Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia came to power by affirming the legitimacy of electoral results in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Holding power depended upon winning real elections.

Pern, like his Brazilian, Venezuelan and Bolivian populist counterparts, was popular. When they were ousted from power, it was by coups, not elections; which their movements kept winning.

More recent populist leaders, like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Hugo Chvez in Venezuela showed the same pattern. They avoided baseless claims of fraud because they staked their grandiose claims of embodying popular will upon the democratic idea that elections represented the will of the people. Berlusconi lost elections in 1996 and 2006, while Chavez lost during the 2007 Venezuelan constitutional referendum. Both accepted the results even though they lost by extremely slim margins.

By contrast, many autocratic losers lie their way out of actual or potential electoral defeat. For example, fascists in the 1930s like the German Nazis saw no value in the electoral system and only used it to claim legitimacy and leadership when it benefited them. Then, they worked to destroy democracy from within.

Indeed, fascists believed that elections and patriotism were essentially opposed because the true leader was not necessarily the one who got the most votes. As Benito Mussolini wrote in Doctrine of Fascism in 1932, Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one.

Adolf Hitler agreed with this logic, seeing democracy itself as a fraud because fairly elected politicians could not represent the true will of the people; which only Nazism, and Hitler himself, personified. Hitler stated in Mein Kampf in 1925 that Nazis had the right but also the duty to emphasize most rigidly that any attempt to represent the folk idea outside of the National Socialist German Labor Party is futile and in most cases fraudulent.

When fascist regimes in Italy and Germany became full dictatorships, elections were no longer needed as a source of legitimacy because the will of the leader was now perpetually embodied in the people.

This was not only a European situation. In 1923, Argentine fascist Leopoldo Lugones equated electoral procedures with demagoguery and claimed that dictatorship was the answer to electoralism. The fall of Argentine democracy followed a few years later in 1930 when Gen. Jose F. Uriburu staged a military coup. Uriburu asked Lugones to write his regimes founding proclamation. Similar critiques of democratic electoral procedures and the need to override them with the will of the leader were presented by fascists all over the world from Brazil and China to Spain and Mexico.

In short, fascism denied the very nature of democracy, the legitimacy of democratic procedures and their electoral outcomes. Its proponents claimed that votes were only legitimate when they confirmed by referendum the autocratic will of their leader.

Populists, in contrast, have used elections to stress their own democratic nature even when they advanced other authoritarian trends.

These differences matter today as Trump, and others, deny the electoral legitimacy of their opponents. Leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Keiko Fujimori in Peru are using falsehoods about systemic deception to create an alternative reality where they can rule, now or in the future, without democratic procedures. Bolsonaro recently said he would not accept the results of the countrys 2022 elections unless the voting system was changed to involve paper ballots, and later repeating his false claims that elections might not be clean. Bolsonaro even threatened not to hold them at all. Most polls indicate Bolsonaros disapproval ratings are rising to an all-time high.

The more we know about the past fascist attempts to deny the workings of democracy, the more worried we should be about present post-fascist and populist forms. Trumps calls for reinstatement based on the legitimacy of a fake past, namely a bizarro world in which he won the election, are blatant forms of fascism that cannot be enabled or accepted.

Federico Finchelstein is professor of history at The New School and author of the new book, A Brief History of Fascist Lies.

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Comment: Trump is blurring the lines of populism, facsism | HeraldNet.com - The Daily Herald

Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan makes a brief statement to reporters before a meeting with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the US Capitol on July 23, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

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IslamabadPakistans embattled prime minister, Imran Khan, in a speech that is likely to reverberate in both Washington and Beijing, accused the United States last week of having crushed the self-esteem of the Pakistani people.

During his address to Parliament, which was ostensibly about the fiscal budget passed the previous day, Khan pontificated on topics as diverse as the golden age of Islam, genetic modifications of Pakistani livestock, and the miraculous achievements of the Communist Party of China.

But nowherenot even while recounting his own achievementswas he as impassioned as when he trained his ire on US-Pakistan relations. Describing Pakistans involvement in the War on Terror as the blackest period in the countrys history, he vowed to never again be a partner in conflict with the United States.

The extent to which he remains able to honor this commitment is yet to be seen. Widely held responsible for mismanaging the economy, which has returned disappointing growth figures and calamitous levels of inflation, he has been hemorrhaging support ever since he was elected amid accusations of vote rigging in 2018. In the Senate elections of March 3, his party failed to gain a majority in the upper house, which was seen as an indictment of not just his leadership but also his ability to enforce party discipline. Members of the lower housewhere Khan has a numerical advantageand four provincial assemblies are tasked with electing senators in a secret ballot, and it is uncommon for the ruling party not to win outright.

There is also a sense in Islamabad that the countrys powerful military elite would prefer to keep positive relations with America and that the timing of Khans speech, which came a day after he told Chinese state media that Pakistan would maintain its close relations with China in defiance of US pressure, could be construed as an attempt at taking sides. Speaking on the 100-year anniversary of the CPC, Khan lauded the special relationship between China and Pakistan and promised to maintain it whatever the circumstances. You only remember a friend who stands with you in your difficult times, he told Liu Xin of CGTN, andnot one to rely on the subtlety of implicationKhan returned to the theme of friendship in his speech the following day. Is America our friend? he asked Parliament. Have you ever heard of a friend bombing you? Have you ever heard of an ally using drone attacks against you?

In the febrile atmosphere of Pakistani politicsexacerbated in this parliament by the oppositions belief that the prime minister was selected by the military rather than elected by the people, it must count as something of a victory for Khan that his remarks on America seemed to energize the housebut then anti-Americanism has always been a popular rallying call. For Sartaj Azizwho served in the previous administration as adviser to the prime minister on foreign affairsit is also an effective way of diverting the agenda from Khans domestic failings. Imrans stock is falling, and he sees this as a way of elevating himself, he told The Nation.

Aziz also suggested that Khan might have been lashing out at having been seemingly slighted by the Biden administration. Even though he became president in January, Joe Biden has apparently yet to make contact with Khan, and senior members of the US cabinet have repeatedly skipped Pakistan in their visits to the region. Just last week, Khans US-educated national security adviser, Moeed Yusuf, appeared to bristle at suggestions that Islamabad was being snubbed by Washington. If they dont want to speak to us, its up to them. No one here is waiting for their phone call.Current Issue

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But while the US has yet to reach out to the Khan government, it has contacted the Pakistan military. Back in May, the US Charge dAffairs to Pakistan, Angela Aggeler, met with Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa to discuss matters of mutual interest and the possibility of strengthening ties. In the aftermath of Khans incendiary speech to parliament, some observers have even begun to speculate that the Prime Minister is trying to show the people that he is still calling the shots.

Whether or not this leads to the kind of protracted tussle between the political and military spheres that resulted in the ouster of former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, only time will tell. But what is certain is that the failure of the Biden administration to reach out has allowed Khan and his government to paint the United States as a cynical and exploitative superpower prone to pathological displays of irrationality. Speaking about General Musharrafs decision to join the War on Terror, Khan said, At the time, we were told that America was angry [after 9/11] and that like a wounded bear it could throw its claw anywhere. I used to ask repeatedly what business we had getting involved in that war. Al Qaeda and the Militant Taliban were in Afghanistan, not here.Related Articles

Pakistans relationship with America has been placed in sharp focus by the news that the United States is on the verge of withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan, something that has led many in Pakistan to draw parallels with the end of the Soviet Afghan war. Islamabad believeswith some justificationthat it was left to deal with the blowback of the Mujahideen and the resultant refugee crisis that enveloped the region. The subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, catalyzed by the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, made Pakistan a frontline state in the War on Terror, according to Khan. I asked repeatedly what we had to do with that war, he said. Does any country get involved in anothers war and lose 70,000 lives? What they [America] said, we kept on doing. Musharraf said in his book that he took money and sent people to Guantnamo Bay.

In a lately resurfaced interview from January 2002, however, Khan appears to defend Musharrafs decision to join forces with America. Bearing in mind how opinion has changed since September 11I do not think the president had much choice. I think in the circumstances this is the best he could have done.

Still, what is clear despite the U-turn is that Khan is planning to fight the next election on an anti-America platform. Buoyed no doubt by the exploits of his foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was given a heros welcome on his return to Pakistan after he accused Israel of having deep pockets in a CNN interview, it would appear that Khans strategy is to position himself as an Islamic leaderalbeit one that doesnt seem terribly interested in the plight of the Uighursat odds with the West and American Imperialism. Whether that will be enough to persuade voters disenchanted with his domestic performance remains to be seen. At the moment it would appear unlikely, but a week is a long time in politics and the next election is not for a couple of years.

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The US Finds Itself on the Wrong Side of Imran Khans Populism - The Nation

Staring down a big shelf of big Trump books, Im beginning to wonder if when it comes to helping us understand the full import of what happened during his four years in the White House less may very well be more. The 400-page catalogs of ruthless betrayals, nasty insults and erratic tweets add to our store of knowledge mainly by compounding whats already there; a slender volume of political theory, on the other hand, can prompt us to rethink our assumptions, raising central questions that we never properly asked before.

Thats only when its done right which Democracy Rules, a lively new book by Jan-Werner Mller, generally is. Mller teaches at Princeton, and is the author of a number of books about political ideas, including What Is Populism?, which happened to be published in the fall of 2016, three months after the referendum on Brexit and two months before the election of Donald Trump.

Populists, Mller argues in that book as well as this one, like to present themselves as champions of democracy, but their notion of the people is cramped and exclusionary; critics, political rivals and immigrants are banished to a realm beyond the circle of concern.

It should be said that Mllers concept of populism as something thats inherently opposed to pluralism and ultimately democracy is pejorative and not uncontroversial, especially among those on the left who want to reclaim the word. But his definition also offers the benefit of a clarifying specificity. Viktor Orban of Hungary, Narendra Modi of India and Nicols Maduro of Venezuela are all populists in Mllers cosmology; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are decidedly not.

Mller begins by acknowledging the widespread fear that democracy is in crisis before pointing out that few people who arent political philosophers have given any sustained thought to what democracy actually is. He doesnt want us to fixate so much on democratic norms those informal rules that beguile and bedevil political scientists as he wants to talk about the democratic principles that animate those norms in the first place.

In other words, if were fretting about the degradation of democracy, what exactly is it that we think were in danger of losing?

Mller says that losing is, in fact, a central part of it: In addition to the more familiar principles of liberty and equality, he encourages us to see uncertainty including the possibility that an incumbent may lose as essential to any truly democratic system. Winners cannot be enshrined, and losers cannot be destroyed. When the libertarian venture capitalist (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel praised monopolies by declaring that competition is for losers, Mller says that Thiel was inadvertently right. Its the kind of sly reversal that Mller clearly delights in; this is one of those rare books about a pressing subject that reads less like a forced march than an inviting stroll.

Preserving uncertainty means that democracy is inherently dynamic and fluid. Individuals remain at liberty to decide what matters to them most, Mller writes, but holding onto democratic commitments also means that freedom has to be contained by what he identifies as two hard borders. People cannot undermine the political standing of their fellow citizens (the growing spate of voting restrictions is a glaring case in point); and people cannot refuse to be constrained by what we can plausibly call facts.

Mller takes care to situate the United States in an international context, using examples from other countries to illuminating effect. Right-wing populists like to rail against neoliberalism, but Orban has been so accommodating of the German car industry clamping down on unions and protests as zealously as any neoliberal shill that critics have started calling Hungary an Audi-cracy. Political parties are an essential part of democratic infrastructure, but parties that are too homogeneous and intolerant of dissent are themselves problematic. Geert Wilderss far-right party in the Netherlands contains a total of two members: Geert Wilders, along with a foundation whose only member happens to be Geert Wilders. What Mller calls intraparty autocracy tends to be a red flag, signaling a profound aversion to the idea that the other side could possibly be right, for no other side is admitted to begin with.

Writing about political institutions in a way that makes them sound vital is a challenge for any writer, and Mllers method is to leaven abstract ideas with concrete examples of bad behavior even if, as he himself says early on, we have a tendency to get caught up in outrageous stories about individuals instead of training our gaze on the less spectacular mechanisms of the system itself.

One of the hallmarks of the Trump years was that the president constantly said things that were startlingly bizarre or blatantly untrue flooding the zone with what Mller (in a polite paraphrase of Steve Bannon) calls info-feces. The incessant clowning made it increasingly hard to draw distinctions between antics that were merely ludicrous and antics that were truly sinister; telling Americans they might consider injecting disinfectant into their veins may have caused terrible harm, but unlike the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, lying about Lysol, Mller writes, wasnt about to kill the system.

Democracy Rules is hopeful, though its author cautions that hes not particularly optimistic. Optimism is about a constellation of probabilities; hope entails active effort. This is a book that encourages thinking, observation and discernment as a prelude to action; Mller, who says that democracy is based on the notion that no one is politically irredeemable and that anyone can change their mind, holds out the possibility of persuasion.

But if this notion is what makes democracy such an appealing idea in theory, its also what makes it so difficult to sustain in practice especially if theres a motivated cohort that doesnt care about Mllers hard border of facts. He points to the right-wing media ecosystem that offered an alternative reality of the 2020 election, in which it was simply unthinkable that Donald Trump hadnt won. At least some of the people who voted for Trump in 2020 hadnt voted for him four years before. Persuasion, like uncertainty, can go any which way.

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Democracy Is for Losers (and Why Thats a Good Thing) - The New York Times

TWO apparently unconnected news items give real hope to the millions of us concerned about how democracy has been undermined by what rightly has been described as a populist assault on truth (The Yorkshire Post, July 3).

Firstly, Labour holding Batley and Spen, albeit narrowly, does at least show the party has a future. Secondly, the sweeping indictment of the Trump Organisation, leading, one hopes, to the imprisonment of that personification of the politics of lies and duplicity the very fuel of populism the world over Donald J Trump.

None of us ever likes to accept we have been systematically conned. I know that many of your readers will feel ardently that I am writing nonsense, when I say that supporting a moral vacuum like Boris Johnson, or continuing to support the absolute economic, social and political disaster of Brexit, are all essentially rooted in falsehood. Deception is now so obvious at Make America Great Again rallies that we are surely witnessing the demise of that hideous distortion of democracy. Slowly, truth will out.

The likes of Trump, Farage and Johnson took so many for a ride; democracy will not be safe until they and their kind are fully vanquished.

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Batley and Spen result offers hope in the fight against populism: Yorkshire Post Letters - The Yorkshire Post

Nurse Delta Santiago (not her real name) has reached the top of her field. She works at one of the Philippines top hospitals, frequented by billionaires and celebrities. But the 32-year-old cant wait to leave. Santiago makes just $520 a month working 12-hour days and shes desperate to land a job overseas.

Because of the pandemic, the authorities have imposed restrictions on public transport, and Santiagos 15-mile (24-kilometer) commute to work in the center of the capital Manila is a time-consuming ordeal. She wants to rent a room closer to her workplace, to cut down on the exhausting traveling, and to avoid the risk of bringing COVID-19 home to her family, but she cant afford to. So, for the past eight months, she has been sleeping in a utility room at the hospital, just steps away from the plush, private medical suites where high-paying patients recline in relative comfort.

There, on a thin mattress spread between rolls of black garbage bags and boxes of toilet disinfectant, an exhausted Santiago crams for the professional exams that could be her ticket to the United States. She also has video calls with her eight-year-old son, whom she rarely sees in person. And she seethes with fury at the needlessness of the suffering that COVID-19 has brought to the Philippines.

I felt rage during the second surge, Santiago says, convinced that it could have been prevented.

Dr. Alejandro Umali, a physician working at a private hospital, rides his bike to work in Pasig, Metro Manila, on April 26. Many Filipinos, including health care workers, are hopping on bicycles as an alternative means of transportation as public transit remains restricted during the world's longest COVID-19 lockdown.

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Dr. Alejandro Umali wears personal protective equipment inside the COVID-19 ward on April 26.

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A police officer inspects motorists at a checkpoint in Marikina, Metro Manila, on March 29, as a strict quarantine is reimposed in Manila and surrounding provinces to curb the spread of COVID-19.

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The Southeast Asian country of 109 million people was already struggling to contain one of the regions worst outbreaks of when numbers began to climb sharply upwards in March this year. Typical daily caseloads have ranged from 3,000 to 7,000 in the past three months, but have been as high as 10,000 or 11,000, and hit an official peak of 15,310 on Apr. 2a figure that is almost certainly an undercount. Less than 5.5% of the population has been vaccinated, according to WHO figures.

What happens in the Philippines matters for the worlds efforts to contain COVID-19. Like Narendra Modis India or Jair Bolsonaros Brazil, the country is ruled by a medical populista term devised by Philippine physician and medical anthropologist Gideon Lasco, and fellow researcher Nicole Curato, to convey how public health crises are vulnerable to authoritarian figures who belittle threats, pooh-pooh scientific data and proffer improvised solutions. Under President Rodrigo Duterte, the countrys COVID-19 containment strategy remains a wild card, affecting not only the Philippines itself but the millions of workers it exports around the world, and the countries relying on Filipinos to fill vital jobs as construction workers, domestic workers, seafarers and medical personnel.

Thats why many like Santiago are in despair. Were back to zero again, she says.

Katrina Pelotin, a field nurse from the City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit, conducts a swab test on a family member of a COVID-19 patient isolating at home as part of contact tracing efforts in Quezon City, Metro Manila, on April 15.

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The second Philippine wave wasnt supposed to happen because the country has been undergoing one of the worlds longest and harshest lockdownsa draconian measure meant to keep it safe in the absence of mass testing or a widespread vaccination program. Quarantine orders of differing degrees have been rolled out across the archipelago since March 2020, enforced by armed security personnel in a manner described in April by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet as highly militarized. Duterte himself has appeared on television telling the police and military to kill any anti-lockdown protesters who resist arrest. His bloody war on drugs had already eroded civil liberties; now, rights groups say, political freedoms have deteriorated further.

And yet the hardship of life under lockdown, which sent the country into its worst economic contraction since World War II, seems to have had little payoff. Since the onset of the second wavetriggered, some reports suggest, by new, more transmissible strains of the virus that causes COVID-19 spreading in the community after some social-distancing measures were liftedhospitals have again been pushed to breaking point. The nations total COVID deaths have nearly doubled during the four months of the second wave, spiking from just over 12,300 on Mar. 1 to nearly 24,400 on June 27.

People were dying at parking lots, even at home, because they could not find hospitals that would admit them. It was horrible, is how Dr. Glenn Butuyan describes the start of the second wave. Media reports described medical supplies running low and ambulances becoming makeshift morgues, lining up outside crematoriums. Tragically, the country continues to dispatch medical workers around the globe, even as its own hospitals stand in dire need of health care personnel.

Filipinos who are economically suffering as a result of the pandemic wait in line for free goods at the Maginhawa community pantry in Quezon City on April 19. The pantry is stocked with donated basic necessities such as food, toiletries and medicines.

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Funeral workers carry the corpse of a COVID-19 victim at a public crematorium in Pasay, Metro Manila, on April 21.

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Cemetery workers grind the ashes of a COVID-19 victim at a public crematorium in Pasay on April 21.

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Today, the situation has stabilized somewhat. There were just over 6,096 new cases, by official count, reported on June 27a small improvement on the situation a month earlier, when at least 7,000 cases were being logged every day.

But Nurses are exhausted, says Butuyan, who heads a hospital in Isabela province, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of Manila, and says he has been battling COVID-19 without any financial support from the government. (Health Secretary Francisco Duque III declined to be interviewed for this story, as did the health ministrys spokesperson, undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire. Harry Roque, the presidential spokesperson, also declined to comment.)

We dont have enough rooms, Butuyan tells TIME. Medicines are difficult to procure. We are so tired.

The mild, 54-year-old physician is well known in the Philippines for releasing a video message in early April that went viral. His call on the government to step up its efforts to contain the virus resonated with his long-suffering compatriots.

I was frustrated. There were so many cases, the hospitals were overwhelmed, and we were not getting much help from agencies that should be helping front liners, Butuyan says about his decision to release the video.

But he also used the message to beg [people to shelter at home] because we could no longer handle people dyingand that was harder to stomach for many Filipinos. Mark Vincent Navera is an aspiring accountant in Lipa City, about 50 miles (85 kilometers) south of the capital. He says repeated lockdowns have led to the cancellation of three professional examinations, costing him jobs that would have brought financial relief to his family, many of whom caught COVID-19. At the rate were going, were still far from gaining our freedom, he says.

An electronic billboard displays a video of Duterte as Catholic devotees pray outside a closed church in Manila on April 2, defying government orders to avoid religious gatherings and stay home during Holy Week to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

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Poor leadership and lack of a coherent pandemic strategy have added to the countrys woes. President Duterte disappeared from public view as cases began to climb sharply in March. To allay questions about his health, photos of the president playing golf were released in early April, but the images conveyed an impression of remoteness from the suffering of ordinary Filipinos and were widely mocked.

When he finally resumed the weekly televised addresses to the nation that have been such a feature of the pandemic in the Philippines, Duterte was only able to offer the same solutions he has always favored: place affected areas under a total lockdown, put more police on the streets, impose stricter curfews, and arrest quarantine violators.

There is no imagination, the medical anthropologist Lasco tells TIME. It is hallmark medical populism, which he and his colleague define as a political style during public health crises that pits the people against the establishment.

According to Lasco and Curato: While some health emergencies lead to technocratic responses that soothe the anxieties of a panicked public, medical populism thrives by politicizing, simplifying, and spectacularizing complex public health issues.

Figures like Duterte, Bolsonaro, Modi, and former U.S. president Donald Trump have downplayed the impact of the virus, spread false claims, and touted their own bizarre solutions to the problem, preventing scientists and doctors from leading the fight. As the first wave of the pandemic raged in India, Modi called for festivals of light and asked the air force to dispatch helicopters to shower hospitals with flower petals. Trump said he was taking anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against COVID-19, despite little evidence on its efficacy against the disease and evidence that misuse of the drug could cause harm. Brazils Bolsonaro infamously called COVID-19 a little flu and has continuously belittled mask wearing, even though he himself was diagnosed with COVID.

Instead of investing in testing or ensuring a timely rollout of vaccines, Dutertes approach has been to put the Philippines on a war footing, which Lasco describes as part of the medical populists pattern of spectacle. The president appears on TV to give COVID-19 updates while flanked by top military brass and has appointed several military figures to senior positions in his campaign against the virus. With the country distracted by the pandemic, the administration has also cracked down on political opponents. On Mar. 7, at the start of the second wave, nine activists were shot dead in the so called Bloody Sunday raids around Manila.

Professor Ranjit Rye is a member of a research group from University of the Philippines that has been monitoring the pandemic. He says a big part of the problem is that scientists are not prime movers in the inter-agency task force created to handle the nations pandemic response. Scientists and doctors are not treated as equals, he says. They are just one of the stakeholders therecompeting, the professor claims, with business interests who want the economy reopened.

A crate containing Sinovac Biotech COVID-19 vaccines is loaded into a truck upon arrival at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila on Feb. 28. Duterte witnessed the arrival of 600,000 doses donated by the Chinese government.

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Health Secretary Francisco Duque III administers a shot of Sinovac Biotech's CoronaVac vaccine on a health care worker during the first day of COVID-19 vaccinations at the Lung Center of the Philippines Hospital in Quezon City on March 1.

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A makeshift vaccination center in San Juan, Metro Manila, on June 1.

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If nothing is done to prop up the countrys ailing health system, Rye and his colleagues believe the Philippines could go the way of Indiacaught unprepared by a giant surge and hamstrung by a woeful shortage of resources, especially health care workers. One nurse, Czar Dancel, tells TIME that 8 out of his 10 colleagues are preparing to leave the country, mostly because of a lack of money. He reveals that his monthly hazard pay amounts to just 300 Philippine pesosa little over $6and even then he has yet to receive a single centavo of it.

For the time being, the countrys pandemic response lurches onward under its erratic, authoritarian leader. Duterte has recently started espousing vaccinations as the countrys way out of the crisis, but its inoculation program didnt begin until March, using donated CoronaVac jabs from China. Achieving herd immunity any time soon looks highly unlikely. Vaccine hesitancy is deep-rooted. Many Filipinos are refusing to be jabbed with Chinese-made shots and a recent poll found that fear of vaccinations side effects was a major concern.

For now, that leaves further lockdowns and social-distancing as the chief means of preventing an even more severe outbreak among an already exhausted population.

None of us thought lockdowns would be this long, says Manila bookseller Honey de Peralta, who stays at home with two children and an elderly parent. None of us expected we would go back to square one.

More intimidation could also be on the cards. On June 21, Duterte threatened to jail anyone refusing to be vaccinated. You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed, he warned on television.

We have the same set of responses, and theres no willingness to acknowledge the mistakes of the past, says Lasco. Its hard to feel optimistic.

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Medical Populism Hasn't Saved the Philippines from COVID-19 | Time - TIME

The defeat for Marine Le Pen in Sundays regional elections in France confirms that the new political model is opening up in Europe. It is based on identity not ideology, on interests not ideas, and on many variants of populism, not a single reductionist populism based on race, nation and hostility to Europe.

Twentieth century binary Left-Right politics is dead. The giant 20th century unitary political formations that bestrode the stage in European democracies Conservatives versus Labour; Social versus Christian Democrats; Socialists versus Gaullists are fading away.

In the last decade academics like the Dutch Professor Cas Mudde on the Left,or the British Professor Matthew Goodwin on the Right, proclaimed the arrival of an unstoppable national populist wave that would conquer Europe. It was based on hostility to the EU, hostility to immigrants, and hostility to what came to be called woke politics support for LGBT rights, for feminism, for anti-racism, or green politics that challenged car-ownership or made roads and public spaces bike or pedestrian friendly.

These prophets of populism filled comment pages with proclamations that Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban and parties like the AfD in Germany, the FP in Austria or Vox in Spain were on the rise and would soon enter government. Donald Trump and the Britain Trump as the former US President vaingloriously called Boris Johnson after the latter skilfully used Brexit to engineer his arrival in Downing Street were seen as the future.

But just as 20th century politics has faded, so too have the early 21st century proclamations by both the Right and Left wings of the intelligentsia that populism was now the only game in town.

In France, it is the return of classic post-Gaullist centre-Right politics that did well with big beasts of the Sarkozy era, but without the sleaze associated with Sarkozy, keeping most control of regional councils. The Left, in the shape of socialist-green alliances, also maintained control of the five regional councils they held.

Macrons LREM party was not even formed the last time these elections were fought, so had no standard-bearers that voters had got to know. Instead, three heavy-hitting centre-Right politicians Xavier Bertrand, Valrie Pecresse and Laurent Wauqiez now have to decide which of them will be the candidate to challenge Macron next year. They may yet fall out as none of the three suffers from undue modesty.

Marine Le Pen failed to make the self-proclaimed breakthrough she needed. This does not augur well for her chances in the Elyse race next May. Her hope is that the two-thirds of voters who could not be bothered to turn out to vote on Sunday will have sufficient enthusiasm for her Rassemblement national party to get into the run-off with Macron.

But the spark has gone from her style. In 2016, she seized upon Brexit as the model for France where she, following in her fathers footsteps, had been the champion of anti-European populism, calling for a rejection of the Euro and a referendum langlaise on the European project.

She put Union Jacks on her social media platforms, but as Brexit turned into a four-year-long political agony for Britain and a steady weakening of the UK economy, she has stopped using the B word as a model to follow.

The rampant Francophobia in UK Brexit circles with attacks on France over fishing, vaccinations, or Macrons European grandstanding are not making any impact in France where there is low-level Schadenfreude at Boris Johnsons difficulties: with the Delta (Indian) variant, a possible Scots-led break-up of the UK, DUP hardline utterrances on the Good Friday Agreement, and the alignment of Joe Biden with European positions rather than English Brexit ones.

It would be too early to write off Marine Le Pen, but the anti-European populist moment may have passed. Viktor Orban is seen more and more as a hateful homophobe, with the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, openly calling on Hungary to quit the EU.In Germany, the racist and Europhobe AfD is not growing in support. Instead, the Greens, who have shaped a green populism over 25 years, are looking like probable governing partners in post-Merkel Germany.

The German Greens are proving themselves sensible managers in Land and big city governments. So while the SPD suffers the fate of other classic 20th century political formations, progressive and non-ideological politics is re-emerging in new forms.

Macron, for example, is as tough on Islamist ideology as anyone who writes for Policy Exchange or the Spectator might wish. The Danish Social Democratic-led government is reported to be cooperating with Home Secretary Priti Patel on opening processing centres for economic migrants, who pay people traffickers to be brought to Calais to embark on rubber dinghies and head for Dover.

The Danish social democrats lost power 20 years ago when they refused to listen to voters concerns on immigration. They now ban marriages between a Dane and a non-EU citizen under the age of 24.

This is the new post-ideological style of winning power in Europe. It picks bits and pieces of populism, but incorporates them into wider political projects with strong elements of social investment to help the left-behinds, who were ignored in the long Thatcherite or neo-liberal era and at Davos gatherings of the super-rich and their fawning politicians.

Identity politics has been taken on board by more and more mainstream parties across Europe, who support regional and sub-national identities in contrast to the southern English elites disdain for Scotland and its quest for respect for the Scottish nation.

Hardly anywhere does one single party rule exclusively in the manner of Boris Johnsons Brexitised Tory party. Coalitions, arrangements, agreements, power-sharing, holding office for two years and then giving way to other leaders are the new norm in European politics (and beyond, e.g. in Israel) in the third decade of the new century.

The resignation of Swedens Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Lfven, just announced today, is a case in point. Lfven headed a heterogeneous minority coalition that lost a confidence vote in parliament a first for Sweden. Lfven now has to see if he can form a new government or give another party leader a chance. But the populist, hard-Right Swedish Democrats, once crudely racist, have had to tone down their extremism if their leader, Jimmie kesson, hopes even to enter a coalition, let alone form one. The price of power is pragmatic compromise, as rank populism wont work.

Populism is based on the Fhrerprinzip like Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary. But even Orban is now facing serious opposition from a broad-based coalition like the one that brought down Netanyahu in Israel. Meanwhile, Boris Johnsons populism has so far turned out to be based on social democratic tax, borrow and spend largesse.

Thus the term populist, which was so modish between 2010 and 2020, has run out of use in the era of Biden, the end of an all-embracing European project, and the patchwork of parties that form most of todays European governments. The professors will have to find a new describer for post-populist politics.

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The populism moment is fading - TheArticle