I should be dead.

Since the start of this stubborn, life-sapping pandemic, I have, perhaps like you, taken precautions to ward off being infected and killed by an ever-mutating virus.

Given my age and medical history, I am at particular risk. Still, unlike so many others, in so many other places, I have been able to work from home and head out only when necessary.

I suppose my diligence, privileges and a large dose of luck have combined to keep COVID-19 at bay for now.

But I know that if the white-coat army of nurses, doctors, and scientists working in anonymity had not engineered and dispensed vaccines that blunt the lethal aspects of a raging, indiscriminate virus, chances are, given my seniority and pathological troubles, I would not be writing this column.

Much more urgently, my daughters would have lost their father. My wife would have lost her husband. My family would have lost a brother and an uncle.

I am sure of this.

So, at a time of year that encourages us to reflect on the near and distant past and to consider future hopes and possibilities, I am compelled to offer my sincere thanks and abiding gratitude to the white-coat army who have not only saved my life, but the lives of people in my orbit whom I admire and love.

They have saved a dear friends life. A career diplomat, father, husband and cancer survivor, my good mate is fast approaching retirement after spending more than 30 years trying to make life better for people in often poor, faraway countries using the influence and opportunity his position and diplomatic passport afforded him.

Without the vaccines, my friend his natural defences weakened by a malignancy he defeated some time ago would likely be facing a more precarious fate.

I am grateful to the white-coat army for saving his life twice.

They have saved my doctors life. A woman of singular grace and integrity, my GP has never let a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis early in her studies prevent her from achieving her calling to tend to the legion of patients who know that she is more saint than physician.

Hobbled, but not vanquished, by an incurable disease that has drained her of strength and a reassuring measure of stability, this born healer continues to heal people whose minds and bodies require healing, confident that she is protected against the vagaries of a virus that haunts the world.

They have saved my sisters life. Another cancer survivor, wife and mother of three, my older sister has devoted herself to caring for others in need young men and women whose bodies grow older, but whose intellects do not. My sister looks after her vulnerable charges with a limitless well of kindness and generosity.

Without the vaccines, my sister her natural defences also diminished by a scarring bout with an insidious tumor would not be able to do what she was always destined to do help people.

In spite of the white-coat armys herculean efforts, there are, of course, countless sad stories of children, women and men who have succumbed to a rampaging virus that does not respect ages, borders or nationalities.

We have watched humbled and amazed as the white-coat army have gone about their hard work, despite the constant danger, exhausting every tool and means available to save lives.

We have watched humbled and amazed their dedication and persistence in the face of the kind of grinding loss and grief that test in ways that only they understand.

We have watched humbled and amazed their astonishing patience with, and care for, the selfish vaccine vagrants who, today, make up most of the residents in intensive care units, riddled with an adept virus that exploits such ignorance and arrogance with devastating ferocity.

These me-first-the-rest-of-you-do-not-matter dolts reject the pleas and advice of the white-coat army until it is too late. Then, in death-bed epiphanies, they curse the slick peddlers of lies and conspiracy theories who told them to forgo masks and vaccines in favour of toxic potions and bravado.

Unlike me, the white-coat army avoid passing judgement on these callous cretins. Instead, they follow their oaths and do their duty to mend human pain and suffering whenever and wherever they can.

In return, populist charlatans, masquerading as prime ministers and premiers, acknowledge their sacrifices in sweet-sounding speeches, while skirting the very rules meant to stem the COVID-19 tides and denying the white-coat army the pay, respect and respite that they have earned many times over.

Worse, populist charlatans, masquerading as journalists in search of a burst of ephemeral attention, have not only smeared selfless scientists like Dr Anthony Fauci but encouraged their audiences to ambush the renowned immunologist and deliver the kill shot.

These fame-hungry buffoons have prompted Dr Fauci to be accompanied on his daily walks with his wife by armed bodyguards.

Through it all, Dr Fauci and accomplished company have retained their dignity and humanity, while the charlatans on and off TV have forfeited what remains of theirs.

Finally, it is not an exaggeration to say that without their indispensable, curative contributions and discoveries, an already anxious global community would, I suspect, teeter on a full-blown and destructive panic that would spread quickly and take tenacious root.

During the pandemic, we have witnessed, in disquieting spams, some of the consequences of this different type of contagion: despair and hopelessness fuel anger and resentment that inevitably turn to violence.

I am convinced that our political leaders are quietly preoccupied with the potential costs and possible expressions of this brewing, unspoken undercurrent, but only the white-coat army can truly address and forestall the looming chaos.

It is an extraordinary burden and responsibility.

You and I must thank the white-coat army of nurses, doctors and scientists for volunteering to confront this existential challenge with the poise, skill and intelligence these awful, disheartening times demand.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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We must thank the white-coat army for saving us and the world - Al Jazeera English

A game of political one-upmanship is being witnessed among the major political parties ever since Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra promised 40% party tickets to women candidates and made some populist announcements for them ahead of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

After making the populist announcements, the Congress has now begun a direct interaction with women, bringing womens issues into political focus. Other major political parties too are now moving forward with programmes or announcements focusing on women.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra gave a bit of political twist to the Bollywood film Deewars iconic dialogue mere paas maa hai on Wednesday to make her point that the Congress, she hoped, would get the support of the women in 2022 polls.

Mere pass behenein hain.behenein rajniti main badlav laayengi (I have sisters. Sisters will bring about a change in politics), Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said in a tweet in Hindi on Wednesday with the #Ladki_hoon_lad_sakti_hoon. (I am a girl, I can fight). Priyanka made the observation in response to a question about the Congress that was not left with any strong base in the politics of caste and community.

A video clip of her reply to newspersons quoting the mere paas maa hai dialogue has been posted along with the tweet.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had on Sunday launched a direct dialogue with women at the Womens Town Hall titled Shakti Samvad in Rae Bareli. She referred to the PMs Tuesday meeting at Prayagraj, saying, We are half of the population and the political parties are not taking the women seriously the Congresss initiative of empowering the women has awakened the political parties now. Asha bahus honorarium has been raised and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to hold an all-women meeting.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday addressed women beneficiaries of various government schemes at a programme in Prayagraj. He said the daughters of Uttar Pradesh would not let the parties that ran the previous governments come to power in the state. Adding to her Sundays observations, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in a twitter post on Tuesday said, UPs women may see. You stretched and Prime Minister @narendramodi has bowed before you. But this is only the beginning. There is going to be a storm of women power. Womens unity will lead to revolution.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), too, are not lagging behind in making claims about the work done by them to empower women. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav has referred to the work his government did for women in a post on social media on Tuesday.

The Samajwadi Party government worked for girls and women and for their empowerment in a true manner by distributing laptops, Kanya Vidya Dhan, launching 1090 women helpline and providing ambulance service for them. Problems, scarcity and their humiliation have put women against the BJP, Akhilesh Yadav said in a tweet on Tuesday.

The SP may make some announcements in its poll manifesto in the coming weeks. The SP chief, viewing the sensitivity of women issues, recently distanced himself from party MPs observations with regard to the Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2021 that Union minister for women and child development Smriti Irani tabled in Lok Sabha on Tuesday. The amended bill proposes to increase the minimum age of marriage of women from 18 to 21 years. The bill was later referred by the lower house to a parliamentary standing committee for further scrutiny.

The BSP has said it is following in the footsteps of Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar to empower women and has demanded reservation for them.

Half of the population is women. But they are still deprived of their rights though respected Baba Saheb Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar has contributed a lot to empower them by giving them legal rights. Now the BSP is following in his footsteps. The Congress and the BJP have almost the same opinion about women empowerment and they believe only in show off. The BSP government worked a lot for social, economic and educational self-reliance of women and the parties opposed to the BSP are now encashing the sameAlso, the BJP and the Congress are not serious about making women strong and self-reliant. This is evident from the issue of 33% reservation for women that is pending in the Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies for years. The BSP demands reservation for women, said BSP chief Mayawati in a series of tweets on Wednesday.

The Election Commissions statistics for the 2017 assembly elections indicates that UP had a total of 14,16,63,646 voters that year. Out of them, 77,042,607 were males, 64,613,747 females and 7292 other category voters. Out of this, 8,67,55,499 votes were polled. Those who turned up for voting included 4,55,70,067 male voters, 40906123 female voters and 277 other category voters. In all, 2,79,032 postal votes were also cast in the 2017 polls.

On the importance of women in the elections, AK Singh former director, Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow, said: Women constitute 50% of the voters and they vote in large numbers. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra adopted a strategy to focus on them. The BJP appears wary because SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is getting a good response. The fight is becoming close and every vote is going to count.

Umesh Raghuvanshi is a journalist with over three decade experience. He covers politics, finance, environment and social issues. He has covered all assembly and parliament elections in Uttar Pradesh since 1984....view detail

Original post:

2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections: Major political parties vying to win support of women - Hindustan Times

We bid the year adieu with relief. How many Americans expected the pandemic to drag into a second year, or thought a peaceful transition of presidential power is no longer a given? We recount some of 2021s biggest and most-troubling stories in the hopes that 2022 will usher in more encouraging trends.

January 6ths infuriating putsch. As insurrections go, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trumps supporters was an exercise in clownishness. Its most memorable image, after all, is of a guy with face paint and a fuzzy horned hat. Instead of causing the GOP to snap out its flirtation with autocracy, conservatives moved from mild condemnation to historical revisionism (hey, it really was Antifa) to whining about overly zealous prosecutions of riot participants.

Vaccines become line in the sand. The average American receives 16 childhood immunizations, so we were surprised that so many people became vaccine-averse when it comes to COVID-19. We oppose government mandates, but figure that this ongoing unpleasantness will go away more quickly if more people voluntarily take basic precautions. Instead, Americans spent most of the year arguing about vaccines with some preferring unusual treatments such as horse de-wormer.

Gubernatorial recall fails spectacularly. California Republicans have struggled to stay relevant, but they thought a recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom would do the trick. Instead of focusing on bread-and-butter issues that appeal to non-Republicans ham-fisted pandemic edicts, raging wildfires, water shortages, failing public schools they ran the campaign like a primary. Newsom defeated the recall by the same tally as he won the 2018 election.

Inflation soars out of control. To much surprise, the pandemic unleashed pent-up demand for consumer products, disrupted supply chains and unleashed inflationary government spending. Home prices are up by a third since the start of the pandemic and car lots are virtually empty, with dealers commanding massive markups. Making matters worse, as many as 111 container ships have idled off the Los Angeles coast. Were not experiencing 1970s-era gas lines, but Jimmy Carter is now a popular search term on Google.

Both parties are doubling down on extremes. During times of upheaval and divisiveness, the political parties could move toward the center, but Republicans have fully embraced the populist rights culture-war agenda and Democrats have fully embraced their progressive wings push for New Deal-era spending. Moderate Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia put the kibosh on the $2 trillion Build Back Better debacle, while Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming has called out the GOP for its January 6 revisionism, but such voices are crying in the wilderness.

Crime wave plagues urban areas. Our cities are enduring unusually brazen acts of lawlessness. In San Francisco and LA, organized bands of thieves have been looting businesses in broad daylight. Murder rates are up 30%. Some California officials are in denial, while others want to throw money at the problem. Theres no simple answer, but were ending the year amid a growing climate of fear.

Dont despair, but consider the news in the spirit of Shakespeare: Things without all remedy should be without regard: whats done is done. But lets all try to do better next year.

More here:

Looking back at news from a trying year - The Whittier Daily News

The United States presidential election of November 3, 1896, saw Republican William McKinley defeat Democrat William Jennings Bryan in a campaign considered by historians to be one of the most dramatic and complex in American history.

The 1896 campaign is often considered by political scientists to be a realigning election that ended the old Third Party System and began the Fourth Party System.[1] McKinley forged a coalition in which businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers and prosperous farmers were heavily represented; he was strongest in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast. Bryan was the nominee of the Democrats, the Populist Party, and the Silver Republicans. He was strongest in the South, rural Midwest, and Rocky Mountain states.

Economic issues including bimetallism, the gold standard, free silver, and the tariff, were crucial. Republican campaign manager Mark Hanna pioneered many modern campaign techniques, facilitated by a $3.5 million budget. He outspent Bryan by a factor of five. The Democratic Party's repudiation of the Bourbon Democrats (their pro-business wing, represented by incumbent President Grover Cleveland), set the stage for 16 years of Republican control of the White House, ended only by a Republican split in 1912 that resulted in the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Although Bryan lost the election, his coalition of "outsiders" would dominate the Democratic Party well into the twentieth century, and would play a crucial role in the liberal economic programs of Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. McKinley did win, and his policies of promoting pluralism, industrial growth, and the gold standard determined national policies for two decades.

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Presidential Election of 1896 - 270toWin.com

(Written by Javed Iqbal Wani)

In the past year, farmers have demonstrated the force of popular determination against an arrogant and defiant government. The farmers movement has proved that the revolutionary spirit of the peasant had not diminished with the arrival of new networks of capital. It has established that peasant consciousness in the country remains intellectually sharp, socially sensitive and politically militant. As opposed to the image of the peasant as a marginal figure in history, the recent farmer protests have proved that they remain very much central to the discourse of democracy in India.

The tone of the Prime Ministers address on November 20, 2021, while announcing the decision to repeal the three farm laws highlighted his uneasiness with farmers victory and laid bare his refusal to admit that their perseverance has crumbled his pride. The Prime Minister has time and again resorted to imagery of the ascetic (faqir) to make his political posturing acceptable to a wider public. He aspires to gain a superior moral authority to conceal the shortcomings of his myopic politics. His reference to his own politics as tapasya (devotion/penance) requires some probing. When a government with all the power and authority at its disposal fails to crush a democratic and popular movement, it speaks volumes of the discipline and dedication of the movement. In the spirit of democracy and justice, it was the farmers whose protest deserves to be called a tapasya, because it brought back many foregone frameworks of inclusive and democratic politics in the face of various hardships. As opposed to riots becoming an increasingly dominant expression of collective action in India, the farmers movement made rights and inclusion in democratic decision-making the source of energy for itself. Against endless negative propaganda, police brutality, and shaming in the name of a religion, the farmers stood firm and responded with clarity, sincerity and steadfastness.

It is pertinent to note that the revolutionary spirit of the farmers was registered by the ruling dispensation as reactionary and anti-national only a little while ago. It is an improvement that the Prime Minister has recently declared them vacuous. His recent address declaring the repeal of the three farm laws put the onus of misunderstanding on farmers. If one pays attention to the layers of the Prime Ministers political message, his delayed apology does not appear to be aimed at addressing the suffering of the farmers but to make palatable the inability of his political power to achieve its goal. However, in the end, the determination of the democratic and popular outran the arrogance of those in power.

The farmers have instilled our confidence in some of the forgotten lessons in popular politics. The authority of the people never gets exhausted by the government. Governments tend to see popular protests as politically unsavoury and unjustified. However, popular politics unravels collective responsibility because it demands a response from the people, civil society, and the state. It provides agency to democracy because it makes the democratic and popular active rather than just being there, dependent on an institutional outside that is increasingly controlled and partial to the ruling dispensation.

As opposed to an increasing trend of populist politics which is inward-looking and exclusionary in nature, democratic politics is outward-looking and not threatened by inclusion. In fact, inclusion is the ethic of democratic politics. Mere dependence on jingoist nationalism where defining, classifying, humiliating, and exterminating imagined threats is the primary agenda leads to the obfuscation of real challenges that the polity faces. Popular democratic uprisings, in contrast, challenge ethnic visions of a nation, confront the narrow view that only unidirectional movement of institutional decision-making deserves legitimacy. Democratic politics steer the discourse back to the people by way of questioning legitimacy and authority and celebrating diversity and difference. On November 27, 2021, with the passing of the Farm Laws Repeal Bill, 2021, and the various subsequent written assurances from the government on the critical issue of MSP and protection from punitive measures against protestors, the farmers victory was etched in the annals of history. By ensuring the repeal of the three farm bills, the farmers have done a great service (seva) to the nation not only by saving the peasantry but democracy itself. The protesting farmers at Delhis borders and elsewhere have returned to their homes, leaving behind an assurance in the end, democracy has defeated despotism.

(The writer is currently an assistant professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi)

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Farmers and the defeat of populism - The Indian Express

French populist and media pundit Eric Zemmour announced his presidential campaign and did so with fiery rhetoric taking aim directly at the ongoing war against Western Civilization.

I have decided to take our destiny in my hands. I have decided to run in the presidential election, Zemmour said in a video officially announcing his candidacy.

It is no longer the time to reform France, but to save it, he added, bemoaning the fact that native Frenchmen no longer recognize [their] country.

Zemmour has risen in popularity due to his bold and brash brand of politics and is now seen as the biggest threat to replace globalist French President Emmanuel Macron in next years election.

We must give back the power to the people, take it back from minorities that oppress the majority, he said.

Zemmour also said words harkening to the Great Replacement, which was for years dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory but is now rapidly coming to fruition throughout Europe.

We will be worthy of our ancestors. We will not let them dominate us, subdue us, conquer us, colonize us. We will not let them replace us, he said.

His full announcement, which is rapidly going viral despite suppression by YouTube, can be seen here:

Big League Politics has reported on the growing awareness among the French of the Great Replacement that is clearly underway:

A new pollhas shownthat more than six in 10 Frenchmen realize that the great replacement is underway to destroy their nation through demographics.

The survey demonstrated that 61 percent of French people believe that European, white and Christian populations [are] threatened with extinction following Muslim immigration, from the Maghreb and black Africa. Additionally, 67 percent of the French are worried about this occurring.

This is bad news for the globalists and good news for populist upstarts in the country. They are using these results to show the demand for new political leadership in France that will stand up to the third-world migrant invasion.

National Rally member of parliament Jean-Lin Lacapelle said: The Great Replacement is a fantasy for a large part of the political class, but a reality and a concern for a large majority of French people. [] Act or disappear!

An additional member of parliament from the National Rally, Nicolas Bay, wrote on Twitter that the Great Replacement is a reality experienced and suffered by many French people, and a legitimate concern for the majority of them.

Zemmours candidacy may pose a major threat to the globalist establishment as the public sours on their project to remake the countries of the world through migration.

Support Big League Politics bymaking a donation today.You can also donatevia PayPal,Venmoordonate crypto.Your support helps us take on the powerful and report the truth that the mainstream media wants to silence.

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French Populist Eric Zemmour Vows 'We Will Not Let Them ...

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The PopuListoffers academics and journalists an overview of populist, far right, far left and Eurosceptic parties in Europe since 1989.The PopuList is supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, The Guardian, and the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy.

The PopuList dataset has been used in numerous publications in academic journals and public media.

Vote shares of populist, far-right and far-left parties (+ combinations weighted by population size)

You can inspect the data through:

The full dataset (including borderline coding and links to ParlGov, Manifesto Project and Partyfacts) can be accessed via the following files:

The old version of The Populist (version 1.0, January 2019) can be accessed here.

If you make use of The PopuList, please refer to:

Rooduijn, M., Van Kessel, S., Froio, C., Pirro, A., De Lange, S., Halikiopoulou, D., Lewis, P., Mudde, C. & Taggart, P. (2019). The PopuList: An Overview of Populist, Far Right, Far Left and Eurosceptic Parties in Europe. http://www.popu-list.org.

Matthijs Rooduijn, University of Amsterdam (contact m.rooduijn@uva.nl for questions, comments and suggestions); Stijn van Kessel, Queen Mary University of London; Caterina Froio, Sciences Po; Andrea Pirro, Scuola Normale Superiore; Sarah de Lange, University of Amsterdam; Daphne Halikiopoulou, University of Reading; Paul Lewis, The Guardian; Cas Mudde, University of Georgia; Paul Taggart, University of Sussex.

This website is maintained by Philipp Mendoza

See more here:

The PopuList

The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Bidens decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice.

Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearingsbut instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesnt care. The impassioned call by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller has not been heeded; on the contrary, he was punished for making the suggestion. It is as if the war were already well on the way to being forgotten by an amnesiac political culture at large. At least the veterans, their families, and the families of soldiers who lost their lives will remember.

The congressional avoidance is the most salient piece of evidence of a general cultural repression that deserves closer scrutiny. It involves more than the standard marginality of foreign policy for the domestic public. Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat has addressed the problem in terms of a lack of patience, a mindset that helps us understand the eagerness to end the so-called endless war. But there is another, perhaps deeper connection between the Afghanistan defeat and contemporary American politics. The impatience with the duration of the commitment in Afghanistan and the perplexed relationship to the distinct features of its culture are indicators of aspects of contradictions in American society and in Western modernity more broadly. Two commentaries by French geographical thinkers, Fabrice Balanche and Christophe Guilluy, have been translated and juxtaposed on this site. Taken together, their focus on space and culture sheds important light on these matters.

Balanche proceeds from the material priority of the geographical terrain in Afghanistan, a country defined by its steep mountains and valleys that have produced a society of compartmentalized ethnicities and tribes, while also posing genuine physical challenges to any invading force. It is this physical and existential reality of Afghanistan that, he argues, was largely ignored by American and Western military planners, as well as by the Soviet occupation effort before them. The aspiration for any homogenizing polity of equal rights, the core ideal of modernity, turned out to be a bad fit for the conservatism and regionalism of the Afghan condition. One might wish that it would be otherwise; one might wish that that the effort to establish a regime of democracy and liberty had succeeded. That emancipation project is what the mission in Afghanistan grew into, after it expanded by mission creep beyond the initial goal to defeat al-Qaeda. The ideals of that modernization and democratization are hard to dismiss. They evidently were not achieved.

Balanche attributes this defeat to a structural ignorance on the part of the planners, who remained separated from the material and cultural reality of the place. They had little appreciation for the facts of life on the ground, for the difficulties of the terrain and the recalcitrance of the culture. Instead they engaged in an abstract projection of Western ideals onto a very foreign arena, both physically and culturally. Given their training and mindset, the planners operateso Balanche argueswith the assumption of a global uniformity of space, devoid of particularity, and they therefore do not take into account the radically heterogeneous conditions of the distinct situation in which they hope to operate. For Balanche this is not only a problem with regard to the Wests inability to understand Afghanistan, but one that is symptomatic of the Western approach to a much wider swath of the Middle East and Central Asia, where the lifeworlds of the population are rooted in diversities that the universalism of modernity discounts. Instead that modernizing perspective treats local culture exclusively as an obstacle to be excised in order to establish a universal regime of liberalism, regardless of the local will.

Guilluy in contrast takes us to one of the paradigmatic sites of contemporary modernity, analyzing socio-economic transformations in France and their geographic expression. His approach overlaps with Balanches account in bringing a spatial-geographic perspective to bear. He describes the metropolitan centers, foremost among them Paris of course, but the other major cities as well, as real estate from which the middle and working classes have largely been expelled, a long-term process of systematic gentrification. After the exile of the popular classes, the inhabitants who remain are the well-salaried bourgeoisie, some slightly to the left, some to the right, in either case well off. These are, for Guilluy, the core base of the political support for Emmanuel Macron. Nearby but safely separated from them live the large populations of immigrants who find their livelihoods in service positions for the wealthy. The traditional French middle and working classes have had to migrate to the peripheries of the country, outside of the French metropoles but also away from those regions that the wealthy have selected for their second homes, especially along the coast. An extensive deracination has taken place. This displacement fed into the populist revolt of the Yellow Vest movement and continues to motivate the far-right electorate. It is often the traditional working class or its children that has migrated from the left to the right, as globalization pushed employment opportunities overseas. They voted for LePen in 2017, and Guilluy predicts that they will vote similarly in 2022, as we still await the selection of candidates.

Against this background, Guilluy details the geographical tension between metropolitan center and the French periphery. To be precise, for Guilluy it is not only genuine location that counts, i.e., measurable distance from a metropolitan center, but rather the distance from integration into the neoliberal model of economic globalization, which has its winners and its losers. And the winners in globalization cannot help but rub salt in the wounds of the losers, declaring them deplorable.

Balanche and Guilluy approach two very different contexts, and there are important differences in their methodologies, but they agree in their central account of a binary structure of spacethe showcase city of Kabul versus the deep Afghanistan valleys, the opulence of the center of Paris in contrast to the degraded periphery with its decaying regions. This is not only a matter of parallel bifurcations; these are genealogically the same bifurcation, to the extent that the abstract universalism that the West attempted to impose on Afghanistan is cut from the same cloth as the liberal globalism of the metropolitan economic model that Guilluy associates with Macronism. (To be sure, the features of cultural conservatism associated with the French periphery are hardly identical to the conservatism of the Afghan countryside, although both stand in important proximity to the category of tradition: the spatial divide maps onto the difference between abstraction and particularity, or between progress and tradition.)

The similarity of these parallel analyses points us back to our initial question: the connection between the disinterest in the Afghanistan defeat and the politics of contemporary American society. The familiar opposition of the American coasts and flyover country is effectively identical to Guilluys contrast of cities and periphery in France. Metropolitan universalism is based on an abstract liberalism that is impervious to the lived experience of a countrys population, held in disdain because it clings to traditions, or at least is treated as if it does. Power, wealth, and what is valued as intelligence are concentrated in enclaves, and what lies beyond is left to decay. The same abstraction that, according to Balanche, could not grasp the geographical particularity of Afghanistan recurs in the metropolitan disdain of the domestic hinterland. This is where the connection to the American situation becomes clear. The political choice to forget Afghanistan is the same as the disregard for the expanses between the coasts. The politics that holds deplorables in contempt is the same politics that does not want to examine its own culpability in the war. This refusal to face up to the war and its lessons will further embitter the domestic conflict between liberalism of the metropoles and the populism of the periphery.

Read more here:

Geographies of Populism and the End of the Afghanistan War - Telos Press

Dec 11th 2021

SEVERAL RECENT elections in Latin America have seen the collapse, or at least the defeat, of the moderate centre. It was true of Chiles presidential election last month, of Perus earlier this year and of those in Brazil and Colombia in 2018. Will it be true of the next big election in the region, in Colombia in May? There are reasons to think that, in this case, a victory for the centre would not just be especially beneficial, but also that it might come about.

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That is not the conventional forecast. Many analysts believe that next years contest will be a repeat, in reverse, of the previous one. In a run-off in 2018 Ivn Duque, a protg of lvaro Uribe, a former president of the populist right, defeated Gustavo Petro, a populist of the left, by 56% to 44%. In a poll of voting intentions by Invamer, published this week, Mr Petro is way out in front with 42%, ahead of Sergio Fajardo of the centre-left (with 19%) and a host of also-rans. Mr Petro would easily defeat any opponent in a run-off, the pollster thinks.

Mr Duque won in 2018 because of fear of Mr Petro, a former guerrilla who was a fan of Hugo Chvez in Venezuela. But he also benefited from Mr Uribes campaign against a peace agreement in 2016 that ended half a century of war between the state and the FARC guerrillas. The centre was identified with the accord, which many Colombians thought too lenient. It was hurt, too, by a failure to unite behind a single candidate. That allowed Mr Petro to pip Mr Fajardo, an academic and innovative former mayor of Medelln, by just 250,000 votes (out of more than 19m) to reach the run-off.

This time Mr Petro looks stronger than in 2018. Mr Uribe is not the force he once was. Mr Duques government has been mediocre and is unpopular, and was shaken by weeks of strikes and sometimes violent protests earlier this year. With no serious rivals on the hard left, Mr Petro has spent the past four years campaigning. A former senator and an undistinguished mayor of Bogot, he has very simplistic ideas but he works politically very, very hard, says Malcolm Deas, a British historian of Colombia. Several opportunistic political hustlers of the right have declared their support for his candidacy because they think he will win.

But it is early days. According to the Invamer polls fine print, 43% of respondents have yet to declare a preference. Mr Petro still scares many middle-class voters. The centre looks more organised than in 2018. Mr Fajardo and five other candidates of the centre-left have formed a Coalition of Hope and agreed to face each other in a primary in conjunction with the legislative election in March. On the centre-right the Coalition of Experience unites five presidential hopefuls, including several former mayors, in a similar primary. Mr Uribes nominee, scar Ivn Zuluaga, who lost the 2014 election, may or may not join them. But he is a weaker candidate than Mr Duque was. Miguel Silva, a political consultant, reckons around 14m Colombians will choose to vote in one of the simultaneous primaries and expects these to be divided roughly equally between hard-left, centre-right and centre-left. That could change the momentum of the race.

The run-off is thus likely to pit Mr Petro against a candidate either of the centre-right or centre-left. This time the peace agreement is unlikely to be a big issue. Colombians hate the FARC but they like peace, says Mr Deas. They want a new political agenda. That could involve security against criminal gangs, better public education and a return to economic growth (something Mr Petros protectionism and his opposition to mining and oil are unlikely to achieve).

So the centre has an opportunity. To seize it requires not just a clear programme but a break with the unpopular status quo and connecting emotionally with Colombians. Mr Uribe mobilised fear of the guerrillas; Mr Petro channels the kind of rage against the establishment that was expressed in the protests.

In a recent book Mauricio Garca Villegas, a Colombian political philosopher, argues that his countrys long history of armed conflict has been driven by a political culture which exalted tribal emotions, of nation, party, class and religion, which turned adversaries into enemies and in which we tend to disqualify too easily those who think differently. In Colombia, he concludes, the real contrast is not between the radicals of each extremebut between these and the moderates. To prevail, the centre will have to tap into more peaceful emotionsof unity, solidarity and hope for a better future.

Read more from Bello, our columnist on Latin America:

Politicians are sparring over colonial history in Latin America (Dec 4th)Latin America waits for tourists to return (Nov 27th 2021)Will electoral defeat favour moderation in Argentina? (Nov 20th 2021)

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Between hope and experience"

Continued here:

Despite the polls, a centrist could win Colombia's election in May - The Economist

The idea that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch is old and familiar, but like so many popular sayings, its unclear where the phrase originated.

While economist Milton Friedman is often credited as the man who popularized the ideathe notion that free lunches dont actually exist because someone always paysthe adage appeared in Robert Heinleins 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress nearly a decade before Friedmans 1975 book featured it in its title. (The phrase is actually the title of Book 3 in Heinleins work, for which he received the Hugo Award in 1967.)

Historians, meanwhile, say the phrase had been around for decades prior to Heinleins book. Whatever its origins, the idea that theres no free lunchthat everything has an opportunity costis one author David Bahnsen says humans have not learned very well.

For this reason, Bahnsenchief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, a National Review contributor, and FEE supporterfeatured the concept in the title of his own economics book: There's No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths, released on November 9.

I recently sat down with Bahnsen to discuss his book and a range of economic subjects, including financial markets, cryptocurrencies, and the key to addressing poverty.*

Q: In the introduction of your book, you say many of the problems permeating economic teaching today stem from a flawed definition of what economics is. So lets start there. What is economics?

I define economics as the study of human action around the allocation of scarce resources. I think you get two components that are both individually well regarded as part of economics. Theres obviously a strong relationship between human action out of the Austrian tradition. And the idea of the allocation of resources being fundamental to what we mean as far as household management has a tradition going to Plato and Aristotle.

I like to blend those two ideas together. It captures the humanity of economics and the incentives in economics. In this definition you wont find anything that can be reduced to a formula or a mere econometric analysis. The focus is much more on the human person, and much less on mathematics.

Q: You mention Plato and Aristotle. In your book you collected some of the most timeless economic insights in human history250 quotes, to be precise. How relevant are these ideas today?

I personally believe that they are more important now than they ever have been. There is a certain timelessness to a lot of the wisdom that some of the great classical economists shared. Obviously you can go back to scholastics and the ancients from Aquinas to Augustine to Aristotle and Plato. There are certain nuggets of wisdom and truth there, but I mostly focused my attention on the classical economists.

Theres a lot on Adam Smith, a little from David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say and some highly regarded 19th-century economists. But even as you come into the 20th century, whether its Milton Friedman or the supply side contemporaries like Art Laffer and Bob Mundell who recently passed awayeven guys like Mises and Hayek havent been gone that longthere was a time when these guys were all winning Nobel Prizes in economics.

Now the Nobel methodology has changed completely away from praxeology and the logic of human action to model-driven economics. I think its bad for the profession of economics, its bad for the academic discipline, but its even worse for the laymen and their understanding of how economics affects the real world because it strips out the wisdom of the masters.

And thats why I wrote the book and centered it around some of their foundational truths.

Q: You're considered one of the best financial advisors in America by Barrons, Forbes, etc. What do you make of financial markets right now?

I definitely believe that were living in a timewe have been for a while and likely will for some timethat were going to have to deal with the good and the bad of the Federal Reserve playing such a prominent role in the economy.

This was always one of the dangers of the monetarist school. Fundamentally, the monetarist always invited a higher role for the Fed into the economy, and we kind of have gotten it. More than just their administration of the money supply by their control of the interest rate, the Fed now has become a sort of mitigator of business cycle risks. When I look at financial markets now, I think thats mostly what were dealing with.

Why are equity market multiples at 22x or 23x earnings? Why is the 10-year bond rate at 1.5 percent, and why are investors totally okay with that? Why are real-estate investors willing to buy very significant real-estate investments for a 3 percent cap rate?

These things all seem quite expensive. But they are all done with a repricing of risk, and that repricing of risk is a byproduct of a Federal Reserve put [a put, referring to a put option, is a financial contract that allows the owner to mitigate risk]. We used to talk about a Greenspan put in the stock market, but I dont think thats adequate anymore. I think its become much more comprehensive. There is an expectation the Fed will be there to smooth out any disruptions that take place in the business cycle.

I think thats something investors have to understand. Theyre not getting the price discovery F.A. Hayek wrote about. Theyre not getting the clean allocation of capital Id like to see as an investor.

Now, I also dont want to bet against the Fed. I dont say this to take a blindly pessimistic position. We have to invest for what is, not what we want it to be. But we also have to recognize this is inviting a high degree of malinvestment and misallocation of resources. This requires us to be more prudent and more diligent in the projects we choose to invest in on behalf of our clients.

Q: You say there are major trends in economics today that should be resisted. One is the trend of collectivism as a means of alleviating poverty and inequality. Can you elaborate?

The left-wing risk is relatively well known. A greater invitation into socialism or quasi-socialism. A higher role of the central planner in the economy. But right now a lot of the right-wing populism were seeing is inviting a certain amount of authoritarianism. I think its doing it out of frustration. Theres a culture war issue, as well as cronyism and the way things are playing out in the economy.

Rather than attack subsidies and the regulatory apparatus, many have said if you cant beat em join em. That we need Big Government to work for us instead of them. Im concerned about that approach. When you have a good aim in mind and go about it with bad means, it usually doesnt work out very well.

My fear right now is that the populist economic ethos is going to embolden and empower the central planner. Its going to embolden and empower the collectivist.

My hope is that some of the principles Im inviting people to rediscover in the book can be persuasive. What we need to do is dig in our heels more around the principles of a free society we believe in, and not concede by just trying to switch the uniform of authoritarianism.

Q: I live in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul, like many other cities, recently raised the minimum wage. They also both passed rent control measures. Minimum wage laws. Rent control. Are these effective ways to fight poverty?

No, they are horrible ways to fight poverty. And the reason is explained through the principles that I believe need to be at the foundation of our economics. The knowledge problem leads to a significant distortion in the economy because we ask someone who doesnt have full knowledge of time and place circumstances to set prices.

When we set prices in a transaction, we take what could take place on a voluntary basis under a precondition of freedom, and we make it happen on an involuntary basis. That takes away clarity. It takes away price discovery. It takes away freedom. It takes away incentives for further developers. It could give false signals to produce.

If one believes that prices, including the price of rent, are packets of information, then rent controls take away information. And because I believe the greatest wealth-building activities in history come about by us adding information and knowledge and ideas to raw materialsthats where I believe wealth creation comes fromby distorting knowledge I think we effectively suppress the creation of wealth.

I believe that the intent of a lot of the policymakers is good, but I believe that free exchange in the economy will lead to the right calibration of supply and demand to set prices in a way that meets the needs of humanity. The government intervention is not just unnecessary, but counterproductive.

Q: Once upon a time this was basically Economics 101, wasnt it? So why are these policies coming back? Is it ignorance of economics or is it related more to the populism you mentioned?

The danger of populism is that it lacks a limiting principle. When youre content to work off a playbook of real principles in the way you develop an economic worldview and structure the scaffolding of what you believe as far as social organization, then I think youre less exposed to the arbitrariness of populism, less exposed to the potential abuses.

You say there was a time when this was considered Economics 101. I think its still Economics 101. Its just that some people have decided they dont need Econ 101. Theyll overlook the economic principle on behalf of a desired political aim and what feels right in the moment. Thats by definition what populism is.

Q: You write that class warfare is at an all-time high in the US. Why do you think that is?

If Im giving a gracious and empathetic answer, I think some of it comes down to the cultural ethos in the post-financial crisis. So many did an atrocious job of identifying the players in the financial crisis and providing proper and comprehensive cultural, political, and economic commentary as to what took place in what was the defining economic event of our lifetime.

Because we let others define that moment, were stuck with a narrative of the oppressor and the oppressed out of the crisis. The only difference is many on the right will claim the oppressor was the Fed or Fannie Mae or the government. Many on the left will claim the oppressor was Wall Street or the big banks.

The fact of the matter is we have this environment now where people believe these narratives. If youre 30 years old, your entire adult life has been bookended by the financial crisis and COVID. People see a system that has not worked for a lot of people but does seem to work for others. It exacerbates class aggravations.

Rather than digging our heels in against cronyism, against a relationship between Fannie Mae and K Street, against bailouts, against a monetary policy that serves to boost asset prices, against the subsidization of student loans that gives college administrators a blank check on how they move tuition prices, we saw more of the same.

A lot of frustrations young people have are frustrations I have. But their emotional intuition is to default to something that makes those problems worse, not better.

We have solutions that address what theyre frustrated about. We need to show that human flourishing is enhanced by free enterprise, but that message is not getting through. I blame those of us on the right who do defend free markets; were not defending them well enough.

Q: You bring up young people. They are facing a very different environment than you and I were. Any financial advice for them or tips for living?

I do believe ideologically that young people have been deprived of the ability to learn basic economics, basic finance. I want young people to have a strong self-determination, to believe in self government and the character traits and virtues that are necessary to have a fulfilling and rewarding life.

But when you get to practical finance and engagement with these circumstances, tenacity is the non-commoditized virtue. Young people cant be replaced by a robot who works harder than them. You can always have a work ethic that will make you desirable in the marketplace.

If I can talk to people before they go to college, Id say half of the people spending a quarter-million dollars on an overrated bachelor's degree from an overrated college could rethink that decision. Or at least have a little more specific strategy behind it.

For people who are already graduated or are already in the workforce, I say wealth creation comes from creating more than you consume. That is a tautology that is never going away. That will always be the story of economics, and thats the best way they can apply it to their own lives.

Q: The sustained inflation weve seen in 2021, combined with issues with the supply chain and labor markets, has resulted in a great deal of economic uncertainty. How precarious is the situation right now?

I am of the opinion that a lot of the inflation were seeing right now is heavily supply chain oriented. I think the velocity of the money in supply right now is so low and going lower that we do face a lot of Japan-like deflationary risk.

Its hard to feel that way when prices are doing what you see now, I know. But I think QE and low interests and other distortive measurements of the Fed have a diminishing return for their policy goals. And the excessive government spending has served to take away future growth, so it ends up putting downward pressure on velocity. But then you have an increase in demand for goods and services coming out of COVID, combined with a woeful capacity for productionfrom port disruptions, labor shortages, to the semiconductor problem, which is quite underrated as a problem.

So Im a little less concerned about Milton Friedman-like monetary inflation than I am of voluntary supply-driven inflation because we as a society are not producing the goods and services we need.

Im hopeful some of those things will start to correct. But Im not hopeful that the economic stagnation that theyve created through excessive doses of fiscal and monetary policy is treatable.

Were blessed to have somewhat better demographics, and somewhat better economic organic growth, than Japan. But if were going to continue at halfhalf!of our real GDP growth rate average for another 15 years, like we have the last 15 years, I think its totally unacceptableboth economically and morally. Yet that seems to be in store for us.

Im hopeful we can somehow get back on track, but right now were not even trying to get back on track. Were just debating how much worse we want to make it.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on cryptocurrencies? Are they a hedge against inflation? A revolutionary new form of money? A pyramid scheme built on speculation fed by the Feds money pumping?

I fear that Ill inevitably lose some part of the audience here, because its not a very popular viewpoint right now. But obviously I cant defend it as an inflation hedge when it has no intrinsic value. The argument many of us have made about money and currency for some time has been it has to be a stable medium of exchange. Anything that goes from $60,000 to $30,000 because of a tweet from Elon Musk is probably not a stable medium of exchange.

I think something whose primary utility is for ransomware criminals is probably not a stable medium of exchange. It will grow in its utility, I dont deny that, but fundamentally it doesnt have an intrinsic value. Therefore the question becomes how long regulators will allow it to function the way it does. I dont think that will be very long.

From an investment standpoint, whether or not one believes in the utility of the medium of exchange, why would the value of a coin inevitably go higher? The only answer for that is speculation.

That does make it more pyramid-like in my mind. Never in my investing life have I seen something end well when the majority of people doing it dont know why theyre doing it.

Q: Your book includes quotes from some of the greatest economic thinkers of all time. Mises. Hayek. Friedman. Sowell. Bastiat. Hazlitt. Do you have a personal favorite?

Ive actually been asked this question in other interviews and I have to say the same thing: I just cant pick one. Hayek at some periods of my life was so instrumental in my development. At other periods of my life Milton Friedman was.

In terms of my own sort of anthropology of economics, the way in which I view the human person and how central my belief about humanity is to economics, Im grateful to people like Father Robert Sirico at the Acton Institute. There are contemporaries like that in the book who are at the top of my list.

As far as the subject matter in the book that is nearest and dearest to my heart, it is about human flourishing and establishing our aim in economics. The material and spiritual flourishing which includes abundance, but also peace and balance and joy that the human person can have.

What is the economic structure that can most facilitate that? Thats an entirely different question than saying how can we get everyone to make the most similar amount of money to each other, this obsession with equity and wealth and income inequality. In trying to do economics as social justice, were trying to do something that is neither economic, nor social, nor just.

Q: That leads right into my next question. You write that a materialistic view of poverty alleviation dominates todays culture, one that does nothing to alleviate poverty. Whats a better way?

I believe that the number one thing we need to do when we look to alleviate poverty is, first, we need to define poverty and wealth. If poverty is the opposite of wealth, how do you create wealth?

As I said earlier, you create wealth by creating more than you consume. So do we solve poverty by having no supply-side solution, but only think about wealth redistribution?

My view is we need to focus on wealth creation. In a free society of free exchange where there is true respect for the dignity of the human person, wed never tolerate an approach that treats half of society like they're incapable of being productive, incapable of being creative, incapable of being innovativeand have them live off the largesse of the other half. I think its insulting and dehumanizing.

We want a system that creates more and more wealth creators. That is the solution to poverty. I want more people who produce more than they can consume.

*This interview was condensed and edited for clarity

See the original post:

Economics, Finance, Populism, and the Fed: An Interview With David Bahnsen - Foundation for Economic Education

A MAJOR flaw or indeed a huge problem if you prefer, with not having a written constitution to safeguard our liberties is that when a populist administration quite legally gets elected then they can attempt a shut out.

History is littered with such events and quite recent history in particular with the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington by supporters of the American populist president shows just how precious and precarious democracy is and that was a democracy with a written constitution.

So back to the UK and its constitutional monarchy that practises some democratic principles, that does not have the safeguards written in stone, instead we are governed by convention and precedent.

READ MORE:Michael Gove's words on Boris Johnson come back to haunt him

The way I see it is that Boris Johnson is just foolish enough to believe as PM he can do anything, his attempt to illegally shutdown parliament is testimony to that. He is also just the correct kind of egotistical maniac to quickly forget about that and go for the ignoring of law to further his own ideas. Again history is littered with idiots of that type they have all ether ended their time in burnt out capitals or having faced international law and lost faced then the final walk.

So yes Johnson will huff and puff but will his party follow him, will the majority in that Westminster Parliament actually vote for dictatorship?

My gut feeling is they will not, my instinct is that already there will be lines drawn by the backbenchers because there is now I think clear water between the Johnson administration and reality and many of those within the Tory party will not want to be remembered by history for supporting Generalissimo Johnson.

Sure he could disregard the courts placing him and his administration above the law but he would then need the police and the military on his side for that to work and he can barely keep the press on side these days. No, I definitely feel that we are witnessing the last attempts of a very spoiled brat of man child attempting to impose his will on everyone and he is about to get the biggest rebuff since history first started recording rebuffs.

So what of us north of the Rio Tweed? Well for us that are already committed to that second referendum life will not change other than bloggers getting more paragraphs from the Johnson administration sordid actions (it is so easy).

What we will see happen is that those wavering, those as yet undecided, they will start switching to decision mode and in doing so join the ranks of the Yes movement. Again I state they are to be embraced and made to feel welcome as a lot of soul searching will have been done by them, so let us offer that hand of friendship an unconditional hand proffered, it is after all most definitely more than OK to change ones mind.

We have all sorts of polls being published showing voting intentions at the next Westminster elections ranging from 56 to 59 seats being won by the SNP which again should not be happening considering just how long the Scottish National Party have been in power here in Scotland.

If nothing else it does show the divergence in the political roads a divergence that starts at the Rio Tweed even if Westminster manage to reign in, control, or replace Johnson, he or she that follows will still be a Tory and we here in Scotland have had quite enough of them.

For you see in Scotland we have most definitely marked our own cards as being so very different from that rancid organisation beside the Thames and the world is noticing and do you know something else, the world approves.

The world likes this country called Scotland, likes our brand of democracy, likes our brand of government and likes our government. When we come out of winter and into spring and the date of the next referendum is announced then we will see those countries very much in a supportive role because many are thoroughly hacked off with Westminster and have grievances going back decades, centuries and some even count in multiples of centuries.

So in a few months as the sky begins to clear and daylight returns so will the Yes movement returning to our streets with marches, rallies and door to door canvassing.

For myself by that time, I will most definitely be as proactive as possible alongside all the other happy champions, aye champions for that is what each and everyone of us is, we are all champions, all supporters of the Scottish right to self determination.

Our future is bright, Independence is right.Cliff PurvisVeterans for Scottish Independence 2.0

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Time to get canvassing for the wide world is out there waiting for us - The National

Anti-vaccine movements, fuelled by Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs, are a notable political force in 2021. In Europe, the United States and Australia, lockdowns and vaccine mandates have been met with protests often accompanied by violence.

In South Africa, conspiracy beliefs, inflamed by social media disinformation, have substantially contributed to the slow pace of the governments vaccination campaign. Anti-vaccine beliefs have a broad appeal, on a spectrum that includes New Age wellness advocates and conservative Christian ideas about immunisation policies being an attack on both bodily and spiritual integrity.

As noted in medical journal The Lancet, there is a key difference between vaccine hesitancy and outright opposition to vaccinations in general. With the former, people may often be hesitant because of poor experiences with medical systems in the past, but they can be persuaded with education and incentives. In contrast, true believers are fanatical and refuse compromise or discussion.

Different elements of the political right have aggressively capitalised on the proliferation of medical conspiracies. In Europe, far-right political parties such as the Alternative for Germany have courted voters by shifting their attacks from migrants to vaccines and mask mandates. Conspiracy theories have also proved a conduit to even more ideologically extreme far-right groups. Neo-fascists see the crisis as an opportunity to accelerate social tensions and broaden support for their hardline positions.

This is not to say that anti-vaccine beliefs are exclusively the province of the right wing, as there are liberals and leftists who have made badly informed and paranoid statements about them too. But practices like monetising disinformation online and organising street protests have most generally been used by the Right.

Anti-vaccine street protests may often involve only small numbers of demonstrators, but they have been characterised by angry tactics such as direct confrontation with police, brandishing nooses and burning effigies of politicians and medical establishment figures whom the protesters see as conspiring to steal their freedom.

Conspiracy beliefs are constantly in flux, but they have followed a general pattern since the introduction of global quarantines in early 2020. Their supporters believe that Covid-19 is either manufactured or not a serious disease. According to this logic, it was introduced by sinister elites trying to increase their power through fear. In turn, vaccines are considered harmful and claimed to cause other illnesses, while also being used as a cover for expanding state surveillance. Its a heady mix of colliding, contradictory and connected beliefs.

Anti-vaccine beliefs often have anti-authoritarian and anti-systemic elements. Politicians and public health experts are depicted as out-of-touch elitists, and the actions of pharmaceutical companies are questioned because they are believed to be deliberately spreading dangerous and untested vaccines for profit.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically right-wing about a healthy suspicion of the powerful. Drug companies do indeed act in ways that prioritise profit over human health, with some using their political influence to ensure monopolies on vaccines. Additionally, some politicians have used Covid-19 for self-enrichment, as evidenced by the personal protective equipment tender corruption in South Africa.

But the right wing is not interested in cogent, evidence-based critiques. Instead, anti-vaccine sentiments are defined by a mythic sense of belief, the adherents of which are an elite of individuals who have become aware of the existence of a somehow invisible and yet also ubiquitous new world order.

This supposed new world order is using vaccine mandates to impose a totalitarian, global dictatorship. It is simultaneously capitalist and communist. For example, Bill Gates is seen as both a profit-seeking oligarch and a radical who is trying to abolish private property.

In stark contrast, anti-mask demagogues such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro are imagined as populist democrats who are resisting sinister elite plots.

Anti-vaccine believers argue that by refusing to be inoculated, they are asserting their own individual freedom and refusing consent to illegitimate authority. But this clearly omits how Covid-19 is a public health crisis and that mass vaccinations are vital to restoring any semblance of pre-2020 normality. By refusing to vaccinate, they are aggressively denying freedom to others and condemning the world to more miserable years of masks and lockdowns.

Adherents of the anti-vaccine movement are themselves helping to sustain a crisis that they claim does not exist. Unsurprisingly, these beliefs often overlap with climate change denial, which itself is perceived as another elite plot.

Anti-vaccine beliefs have a widespread appeal across right-wing politics. In South Africa, it has been embraced by conservative Black Christians and figures in the conspiracist wing of the radical economic transformation kleptocrat faction of the ANC. But, they have also been adopted by outright white supremacists like Steve Hofmeyer and alt-right cartoonist Jerm.

Despite their substantial differences, what unites them is how they belong to what political theorist Roger Griffin calls the populist radical right. Their politics is highly reactionary and driven by a deep sense of mistrust of political and economic elites. They are the authentic people, the legitimate expression of popular democracy. But their definition of the people is highly constrained and based on a bigoted fear of outsiders and difference.

Again, given daily revelations of political and economic corruption and misrule, this mistrust is understandable. But the populist right has no interest in reforming or solving social problems, let alone radically changing the material miseries caused by capitalism and authoritarian state power. Instead, they have focused on scapegoating and denial.

The media conversation on vaccine conspiracy beliefs has been dominated by the question of public education and how to get people to suspend vaccine hesitancy for the social good. In a pandemic, this social outreach is vitally important. But it can occlude how hardline anti-vaccine groups are not really interested in facts or debate their beliefs are primarily emotional, giving expression to deep-seated desires, fear and dangerous levels of anger.

Rather, they are attached to an image of themselves as freedom fighters, engaged in an operatic struggle with nefarious forces of control. They are awake, we sleep. Throughout history, times of plague and crisis have sparked political and religious movements fuelled by similar beliefs.

This sense of looming disaster existed well before the shock of Covid-19. The continuing crises of capitalism, extreme inequality and social hardship and environmental disaster fuel a very tangible sense of pre-apocalyptic fear.

The last period of such sustained global economic hardship and political turmoil was in the 1930s. In that crisis, political organisations like the Nazis based their propoganda on elaborate conspiracy theories about the hidden hand behind both Germany and capitalisms failings. Notably, the Nazis were a relatively fringe organisation until the Great Depression shifted the political landscape in their favour.

Despite substantial evidence that neo-fascists have gained a foothold in the anti-vaccine world, they often frame medical doctors as the real Nazis. And while they share the 20th-century far rights penchant for embracing pseudoscience and fabricating bizarre political fantasies, they are far more individualistic.

Far-right movements of the last century were rooted in extreme nationalism, and much of their appeal was based on a politics of mass collectivity. Faced with the alienation and dislocation of capitalist modernity, fascists offered what philosopher Erich Fromm called an escape from freedom by promising a new world of blood and honour, freed from the burden of personal choice.

In direct contrast, anti-vaccine groups are almost pathologically obsessed with individual freedom. They see no distinction between public health measures and extreme state terror and violence. But they have no interest in protesting against actual civil liberty abuses that have taken place during lockdowns, such as the murder of unarmed civilians by soldiers and the police during the first hard lockdown in South Africa in 2020.

Instead, their vision of freedom is completely solipsistic and disconnected from any kind of social good. Anti-vaccine groups are not protesting because they believe they can overthrow the medical elite they say is ruining the world. Instead, they use demonstrations as a chance to vent personal frustrations and demand that they can get back to shopping without masks.

They believe that all the social and economic crises of today are just hype and demand to be returned to a state of blissful, atomised consumerism. Such extreme narcissism reflects the neoliberal culture that has globally dominated the last half-century.

It has inculcated a harsh world-view that sees society as a battlefield on which there can be no middle ground between the social good and individual freedom. It is the world seen through the darkened windows of a fuel-guzzling SUV and everyone else is either an enemy or a mark to be exploited.

Like a religious cult albeit without a central, domineering leader the anti-vaccine movement combines an often contradictory mix of apocalyptic paranoia and irrationalist denial of scientific reality. Its adherents rage against some aspects of the social system, such as the pharmaceutical companies, but politically support authoritarian capitalism and ultra-nationalism.

Anti-vaccine ideology is dangerous because it connects feral consumerist narcissism with deeply reactionary political organising. It is imperative to understand how these movements think and operate because, if the last century is any guide, we should expect mass right-wing politics to flourish in the declining economic and social conditions of the 2020s.

Chaos, fear, social divisions and a general sense of collapse are historically the radical rights greatest allies, making the late capitalist derangement of the anti-vaccine movement a harbinger of potentially even more extreme political cults in the near future.

Continue reading here:

Blow up the outside world - newframe.com

Abiding by his campaign promise as well as his 2020 election adversarys nickname for him, US President Joe Biden during his first week in office slashed cable news viewership nearly in half. The ratings slump coincided with a Wall Street story for the ages, where a large group of small money investors coordinated on the Reddit forum Wall Street Bets and blew up the stock value of GameStop in a gleeful act of rebellion, after discovering that numerous hedge funds had been deliberately undervaluing the video game retailers stock by betting against it. As the cable news audience moved over from politics to business, to watch finance speculators howling for more regulation now that the tables had turned, consumers of internet news turned, as they always do, to a mixed martial arts cage fight announcers take on the matter.

The five million viewers who showed up to watch Joe Rogans video clip in the past week were referred to fellow podcaster Saagar Enjetis revelry in the collective act of Average Joes taking on people he despises the most, as the 28-year-old conservative commentator observed in his screed against those waking up now after having been silent on the crimes of actually influential people who rig our economy on a daily basis. Saagar himself recently surpassed a million subscribers on the morning news hour Rising with Krystal and Saagar, an internet program run by The Hill newspaper, which gained notoriety for its (rightly) favourable coverage of anti-establishment presidential candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang when corporate-owned cable news was hostile to both. Soon after, Saagar a social conservative and fiscal liberal and avowed socialist co-host Krystal Ball co-authored The Populists Guide to 2020 (Strong Arm Press), their bestselling companion to the elections told from what they call populist left and populist right perspectives.

If the American populist left was animated by the emerging socialist consciousness from #Occupy through Sanderss 2016 and 2020 runs for the highest office, the populist right was left to contend with former president Donald Trumps cult of personality; while the Sanders movement now asserts itself through a growing body of Democratic Socialists elected to the US House of Representatives, Trumps insurgency has derailed into conspiracy-mongering carried out by elite Republican politicians claiming like the man himself that the 2020 election was stolen. Can one realign this party, which continues to induce its working class voters into acting against their own interests, towards fighting for unions and a welfare state?

Heres what Saagar had to say.

Thank you for doing this interview, Saagar. First of all, congrats, Rising just got 1 million YouTube subscribers. Ive been one since back when your videos got 1,000 views on average. I was drawn to the fact that youre upfront about your ideological positions, which to me seems better than being a news show that pretends to be neutral. Can you give me a glimpse of these ideological beliefs and talk about the formative stages of your politics?

Its a misconception that I started out as a rock-ribbed Republican. Theres a pipeline that most people who call themselves conservative pundits, come from. They would have attended one of a few colleges and been part of some youth student organisation. That just wasnt it for me. Ideologically, 9/11 made me politically active. Although growing up in Texas, I rejected GOP normative orthodoxy. The original formulation of my politics was embedded in this guy who used to represent the district I grew up in. Called Chet Edwards, he was a Democrat representing one of the most conservative districts in the US. Growing up thinking of him as the conception of the Democratic party, I got to Washington at 18 interning for him, and realised, Oh man, he was so far out of step with the rest of the Democratic party.

So, I was not a Republican, and Im not a Democrat. I didnt feel like I had any home whatsoever, which is how a lot of people feel. Ive always been anti-woke, although that wasnt really a thing ten years ago, but there were inklings of the rejection of identity politics. I never fetishised fiscal conservatism, so the only thing that I encountered and thought, Wow, thats me, was this burgeoning movement embodied by Reihan Salaam and Ross Douthats book The Grand New Party, about the working class GOP and how the majority of people who vote Republican do not benefit from the partys economic policies. So, the rejection of identity politics and embrace of pro-worker economic policy is central. When I say rejection of identity politics, I dont mean in a glib way. I mean maximising the unit thats most important, which I think is family, having children, and having traditional values.

Krystall Ball and Saagar Enjeti host Rising with Krystal & Saagar for The Hill. Photo: Twitter/@esaagar

How do you ensure that you represent the views of working class conservatives both on Rising, as well as your podcast The Realignment referring to the realignment of the Republican coalition based on class rather than identity, if I see it right? Who are some activists and organisers whose views and research you represent or share?

I dont want to be seen as a spokesperson for certain people. I have an ideology and a guiding set of principles. I praise people who occasionally align with them, and Ill criticise them when I dont. Josh Hawley was somebody who on policy, I was aligning with, in a lot of different ways. But he was also someone who pursued Stop the Steal, president Donald Trumps election fraud claims, and I dissented very strongly. I dont see it as my job to be a spokesperson or representative for anybody, and if anything, I see it as my job to say what I think, and Im fortunate that a million people care. Its great if activists or politicians want to be talked about or want to collaborate, but I dont look at it the other way around.

Imagine a world where president Donald Trump did not happen. Can you trace the steps an ideal populist right candidate might take, from the lowest rung on the ladder? How would such a candidate campaign, to what offices, and how would he/she govern?

Thats a great question. I dont honestly know the answer because the truth is, Im not sure anyone but Trump could have done it. I think you did need somebody who was so bombastic, and the other side of it, which everybody underestimated is, he was just so famous. He was a household name. He needed billions of dollars of free advertising in order to overcome the deficit of the biases within the media, you know what Im saying?

Cache, you mean.

Yeah, exactly. So, Im not sure what the answer to that is.

Youve worked for a Democrat politician, you use the word heterodox a lot, and you liked Andrew Yang among Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 US Primary election. If Yang was up against a standard fiscally conservative and socially posturing as liberal Republican politician, would you vote Democrat? And if youre embracing heterodoxy, why are you still with the Republican party?

This is a very tough question, Karthik. Ill answer it honestly. Why do I like Yang? He has done the best to transform the culture wars and cut through to whats the core rot in American society. Yang is one of a few who had the courage to call out pharma companies for their publicity during the opioid crisis. He is one of the few people willing to talk about class disparity. The third thing I love about Yang is the universality of his message. A universal basic income applies to everybody. Yang is focused on lifting up people, no matter race or religion.

The flipside of the coin, though, is what else does Yang say? He calls out pharma companies, but he also says, we should legalise heroin. I dont agree with that. While he says we have a mass depression and suicide epidemic, he seems to be calling for being more socially libertine. Those are not things I support at all, and in fact, I think it will dramatically contribute to exacerbating the problem.

I will always appreciate people like Yang, Bernie Sanders, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], even Ilhan Omar, or any progressive leftist who talks with compassion about poor people in this country. But I think that their solutions would be dramatically destructive to people they claim to want to represent.

So, I dont know all that the Republican in your question supports, but if he/she really aligned with me on the social stuff, then Id feel compelled to vote. For sure less so against Yang, because Yang legitimately does want to help people raise their families. I believe that, but I think hes mistaken when it comes to a lot of socially liberal policies. Yang is at his best when hes describing the problems we have. The reason I praise him or Bernie, or anyone, is because I want somebody to talk about them. Thats it. That doesnt mean I agree with their solutions to those problems.

Andrew Yang. Photo: Reuters

Interestingly, this is the situation on both sides of the aisle. On both populist right and populist left, politicians agree on the diagnosis of problems but disagree on solutions. Because theres definitely bipartisanship between Democratic and Republican establishments, how do you think there can be bipartisanship between the populist right and left?

This is funny, people ask me this all the time, and I have a stock answer now its not going to happen. One of us has to win because were diametrically opposed. The left wants to legalise all drugs. The right says, no actually, drugs are bad, and punitive measures are important so that the populace doesnt get hooked on addictive substances and falling into destructive patterns. This comes into play, frankly, after the Black Lives Matter protests, and Im sure that Ill get some heat for this, but the beating heart of all liberalism, both progressive and normie leftism in America is a socially progressive ideology to the extent that progressive leftists believe in universal programs in order to solve racial inequities. Im not saying there are no racial inequities Im saying they use their justification of neoliberal race theory in order to push their programmes. When I talk about income inequality and student debt, I am talking about freeing up people in order to get married in America. The left is talking about just being free to do whatever the hell you want.

This diametric opposition of the goal makes it so that you cant work together. Let me give you another example childcare. Im not saying this is representative of my view, but I see the left being like, we need universal childcare so that everybody can get out to the workforce and go work. The right is like, we need tax credits for stay-at-home moms in order to take care of the kid. So, in one case you get a more productive free person to produce economic value and achieve individual actualisation, and in the other, you get similar type policy to maximise family formation in the US.

Its crazy how youre saying you want to get politics out of the culture war, but youre also saying it has to keep it going. How do you engage with the culpability of politicians and media personalities animating violence among the electorate, whose provocations are oftentimes purely performative or worse, cynically exploitative?

We dont talk nearly enough about the culpability of the people who got us to where we are, and to the extent that there is an alliance between left and right, this is where it should be lets tear down the people who got us into the war in Iraq, got us into NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], and wrote the WTO rule so we could be dominated by China. These are the people who set the conditions that got us to where we are today, and I blame them more than I blame anybody.

To the extent that theres a right-wing critique of me that Im too cozy with the left and probably the same thing from the left of my co-host Krystal look at the people who want to take us down. So whenever there are calls to de-platform me, functionally, what makes them different from those by a libertarian billionaires who wants to make sure I dont have a voice. Its always important to know your enemies, and to the extent that we can unite, it should be to tear down the figures who got us to where we are. Then we can have the Battle Royale.

How do you plan to build alternative institutions that can contest Bush-era figures? Also, since you talk about its importance, how do you spread this family consciousness, or are you reflecting an already-growing awareness? On the left, we talk about education as an important aspect of organising. What does that involve on the right?

You dont have to educate people on how to form families and have kids, man. Its innate in all of us. In fact, education in America functionally teaches you not to value those things but instead to value the money in your bank account more than having a kid, getting married, and being around your parents. You dont need promotion of that. All you have to do is build up institutions that already exist, and that were then destroyed by neoliberalism.

Let me give you another example, which is again a very conservative point. People who have stable jobs with income to support a family of four, will have children, were generally happier, and reported greater satisfaction with their lives. How do you do that? You need unionisation. You need to have collective bargaining through non-governmental institutions to achieve the desired policy outcome. In 2018, we had the lowest marriage rate on record. Its not that people dont want to get married. They cant afford it. You know how much it costs to have a kid in America? It can be up to $10,000, depending on what your deductible is. Its crazy.

How would GOP and conservatives writ large regain trust on unionisation, when the Republican party is arguably responsible for the destruction of unions in the first place?

Thats a good question. You dont need to regain their trust, because liberals are losing their trust through pursuing identity politics. In 2016, Trump won 40% of the union vote, man. We dont have the vote totals in 2020 yet, but Im willing to bet it was higher. What does that tell you? If you try and take away the bedrock of what they value, people are not going to vote for you. Thats increasingly been the trend with the Democratic party. You want to get that union vote to 65-70. Youre never going to get to 100%. Politics is about margins. For example, everyone says the GOP only won 35% of the Latino vote, but it was 17% last time. Thats how you saw Florida go from GOP +0.8 to +3% in 2020. Trump won Florida by more than Obama in 2008. So, all you have to do is improve performance on the margins.

How do you engage with legitimate concerns of racism, especially among the working class GOP electorate, regardless of the culpability of politicians in stoking them?

I grew up in a town that was essentially segregated between people affiliated with the university system, and the working class people who served them. I chalk up the racial discrimination that I experienced to the fact that theres a deep-seated frustration with the idea of this foreign elite living in the city whose parents their parents work for. And you know what, thats as much a race story as it is a class story. You cant unbundle those things. So, when I think about the people who even gave me a hard time, some of them are not doing so well. Maybe they still hold onto their beliefs. My thinking is that, its the responsibility of any elite class and this applies to Asians more than any other immigrant group in America to understand the problems that poverty can bring, and the horrible ways that they can manifest themselves. A lot of people will be mad and say Im making excuses for racists. Theres always going to be a section of the population that will be racist in a multiethnic democracy, but I believe that people are good people, and to make society marginally more harmonious, you have to give people equitability and buy-in into the system by reducing economic disparities.

A demonstrator holds a sign during a Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, in Hemel Hempstead, Britain, June 13, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Boyers

An American journalist would have led with this given we live in the so-called post-truth age; I love how they talk like they havent contributed to that. How can either political party be held accountable if the media ecosystem is entirely hijacked by this intra-K-street politics? Does anybody care about being accountable to independent media like you?

No, they dont care at all. To the extent that they do, its because they recognise that I have an actual audience. I will tell you the one thing that woke everybody up. People in DC dont care about YouTube. You and I know that a million viewers is a lot. Here, they dont care about that. They equate YouTube with guys sitting in basements, as in its not legitimate. Thats what Eric Weinstein calls the gated institutional narrative. They would rather be well-known among the 400,000 CNN viewers, than they would among my viewers. But when the book did really well, a lot of people started paying attention. Nevertheless, nobody on Capitol Hill is like, did you hear what Saagar said. Hugh Hewitt, who has way less listeners than I do, his voice matters much more. If somebody were to write a Wall Street Journal column, they would have much more impact on Capitol Hill than anything I have to say. What Im doing is fringe, and even if they might be shocked by the numbers, they would never even admit to listening to anything I do. I think that might be changing as the new generation grows up, because while a Congressman might not care what I think, their staff do, but I dont want to exaggerate my power.

China is a favourite topic of yours, which you briefly alluded to earlier. Recently, China nationalised Alibaba and ANT, their largest tech companies. I think recently Jacobin had made their separate argument for nationalising US Big Tech firms as an anti-monopolist measure. Can you share your thoughts on China in general as well as this specific instance?

Should you allow groups of firms to have massive economic, political and social control over your country? No, but that doesnt mean you have to silence one of the most successful people who has ever come out of your country. Look, I dont want the government nationalising everything. The problem is, the libertarians would say, then the alternative is that you must allow a massive Google. Theres a midway here. Its deep in the American tradition to pursue anti-monopoly policy and have regulation, which is not the same thing as Xi Jinping silencing Jack Ma because he realises that Ma could use his influence to counter the goals of the Chinese Communist Party.

So, I dont believe and never will, in the Chinese model or anything, even though its obviously more efficient. But what I think makes us great is our ability to have actual balance. And to the extent that theres an argument here, its that we have fallen way out of balance. The debate should be about what the strictures and the balance looks like. We have to tear down the current infrastructure, and then I want to have a war on what that looks like.

Jack Ma and Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Reuters

Last question. What would the populist right foreign and immigration policy be? Does it believe in an America of the poor and huddled masses?

Its not mutually exclusive, but I also hate the Statue of Liberty question, because what do you want to do, run your immigration policy based on a Statue that got here in 1885? I think that immigration should enrich the nation. I dont think its primary goal should be enriching people who are not your citizens. Immigration policy should be geared towards a win-win situation, and not a lose-lose one as it stands in many cases. The way we talk about immigration is largely a function of the lack of familiarity with history, the lack of respect for cultural friction, the lack of respect for peoples wages, and in many ways its driven by an elite hatred of the people who live here, and an apathy for their suffering. The foreign policy would be a rejection of military adventurism for the sake of adventurism, and seethis is where I differ so much from the left. When I say I want troops out of Afghanistan, me and leftists agree, but then theyre like, its because Americas an irredeemably evil racist nation. And Im like, do you know what Afghanistan does to its people? So, I want to get out of Afghanistan, retool our military in a productive capacity so we can take on China, our geopolitical competitor for the next 40-50 years. I dont want to go to war with China. I dont want to see regime change in China at the USs hand; I think that would be bad because were bad at it. But we need to be able to defend ourselves. So, its about recognition of Americas military adventurist limits, and not seeking out ideological wars like, for example, invading Iraq, or staying in Afghanistan for 17 years hoping we can turn a 12th century society into a Western liberal democracy overnight.

Karthik Purushothaman is a writer who grew up in Tamil Nadu and now lives in the United States. His work has appeared in journals such asBoulevard,HyperallergicandRattle.

Originally posted here:

The American 'Populist Right' After Trump - The Wire

ROME (Reuters) - Italys 5-Star Movement, once a prototype for successful populist and anti-establishment parties around Europe, is at a crossroads. Does it fully embrace the political mainstream, or revert to being an outsider?

FILE PHOTO: Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi drinks a beverage during a debate at the Senate ahead of a confidence vote for the government, in Rome, Italy, February 17, 2021. REUTERS/Yara Nardi/Pool/File Photo

With support ebbing, its fate could shape Italian politics for years to come, and the battle lines over its future have been drawn.

When the head of state asked former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi on Feb. 2 to try to form a government, and so end Italys political stalemate, 5-Stars leadership immediately ruled out supporting him.

But its founder, 72-year-old former comedian Beppe Grillo, had other ideas. Four days later, he rushed from his home in Genoa for a crisis meeting in Rome with about 30 of 5-Stars top lawmakers.

At the encounter in a conference room in the capitals labyrinthine Chamber of Deputies, he made clear 5-Stars initial decision should be reversed, according to a lawmaker who was present.

When we walked in Grillo was pretending to talk to someone on the telephone; it was a kind of comedy act, said the source, who declined to be named because the meeting was private. He was discussing ... why we should be part of the government.

Some 5-Star politicians and voters are deeply unhappy with the line imposed by Grillo.

At Draghis first vote of confidence in parliament on Wednesday, 23 of 5-Stars 92 senators defied the party line and refused to back him. 5-Stars caretaker leader Vito Crimi said most of them would be expelled.

If 5-Star emerges from its crisis further weakened or transformed into a mainstream progressive party, it could mark the end of the populist wave which swept Italy at the last election and which alarmed financial markets and its European partners.

Matteo Salvinis League has already shifted out of the far-right camp to get behind Draghi.

In some ways, 5-Star has followed a similar trajectory to other populist parties in southern Europe such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

All three achieved power, but have been absorbed into the mainstream they vowed to fight and seen their support wither.

I dont know what you should call us now. Maybe the anti-anti-establishment party?, 5-Star lawmaker Raphael Raduzzi told Reuters. We have to ask ourselves what we want to become.

Grillo gave up day-to-day involvement in 5-Stars affairs about five years ago, but when crucial decisions are to be made he is still the one who calls the shots.

Shortly before his meeting with 5-Star parliamentarians, he wrote a blog post calling for the new government to name a minister for ecological transition with full responsibility for energy policy.

Grillo had already spoken to Draghi and received an assurance this ministry would be created in return for 5-Stars backing, a source close to the 5-Star founder told Reuters.

Grillo, who communicates with the public mainly through his blog, declined to comment for this article.

Draghis spokeswoman confirmed Grillo and Draghi spoke about the governments formation.

They agreed over the importance of creating a government with a strong emphasis on ecological transition, she said.

Ecology has always been a central part of 5-Stars platform. It is one of the five policy stars from which it takes its name. Sustainable transport is another.

Italy, unlike Germany and France, has never had a successful Green party and Grillo is eyeing that gap in the hope of saving his party from gradual extinction.

Huge sums as well as high ideals are involved. The European Commission has ordered that policies to fight climate change must account for 37% of its Recovery Fund set up to help the blocs battered economies, the largest single component.

In Italys case that means 70 billion euros ($85 billion) to spend on green transition over the next six years.

Now the environment. Whatever it takes, Grillo tweeted this week under an Andy Warhol-style multicolour diptych of Draghi, in reference to the former ECB chiefs famous 2012 pledge to do whatever it takes to save the euro.

5-Star is the largest force in parliament thanks to its triumph at a 2018 election when it took 33% of the vote, double the tally of its nearest rival.

It now has less than 15%, making it Italys fourth largest party, and desperately needs a new identity.

It has four ministers in Draghis newly formed cabinet, but for many members, supporting the government of a former ECB chief is unacceptable. Doing so in a coalition with sworn enemies makes matters worse.

Founded in 2009 as a channel for protest against the perceived corruption and cronyism of Italys political and business elite, 5-Star espoused internet-based direct democracy and vowed never to form alliances with traditional parties.

In the last three years it has ruled in two coalitions, with the right and centre-left, and is now set to govern with both at once.

For me this is a step too far, said Raduzzi, a lower house deputy who opposed joining the government of technocrats and career politicians.

Raduzzi has not left the party, unlike one of its most popular figures - Alessandro Di Battista - who writes frequent articles attacking Draghi or members of his government.

Di Battista, a charismatic 42-year-old firebrand, walked out after the decision to back Draghi, but his followers expect him to return when the time is right and see him as a future leader.

The battle for 5-Stars future is likely to be fought over the opposing visions of Di Battista on the one hand and Grillo on the other.

Grillo, for now in the driving seat, wants to transform 5-Star into an environmentalist, pro-EU party allied with the centre-left Democratic Party to compete with Salvinis rightist bloc.

Di Battista wants 5-Star to avoid a structural alliance with the left and to regain its old anti-establishment spirit, with a more critical stance towards the EU and big business.

I believe this government is suicide for the 5-Star Movement and is bad for Italy, Di Battista told Reuters. He did not rule out a return to 5-Stars ranks in the future.

The risk for 5-Star, currently in the hands of the uncharismatic Crimi, is that whatever path the party takes, by the time of the next election in 2023 its decline will be irreversible.

The slump in 5-Stars support was not altogether surprising, given it is an anti-establishment party also in government. Without sufficient seats in parliament to rule alone, the movement also joined forces with either the left or right.

Unlike the leftist Syriza and Podemos, or the far-right National Rally in France and Austrias Freedom Party, 5-Star has always presented itself as an ideology-free movement with voters from the left and right alike.

Some political commentators believe its best chance of revival lies with former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who has no party affiliation but is close to 5-Star.

The message Conte posted on Facebook on his last day as prime minister received more than a million likes, a record for an Italian politician. He promised to continue the path of his 16-month, left-leaning government in future.

Millions of 5-Star voters, and some of its politicians, hope he does so as their leader.

($1 = 0.8275 euros)

Writing by Gavin Jones; Editing by Mike Collett-White

The rest is here:

Divided over Draghi, Italy's 5-Star has an identity crisis - Reuters

byBILL WILSON|| The Republican partyis struggling to define itself, and the elephant in the room is populism. With corporate Democrats in the White House and an establishment GOP eager to return to defending corporations and policing the globe, is there a place for conservative populists?

One theory posits that conservative populism was a fleeting fad, championed by the charismatic larger than-life Donald Trump, and that it will fizzle without him. The theory is that the almost 75 million Americans who voted for Trump adopted his populist ideas on immigration, trade policy, and scaling down U.S. military operations overseas, more because they liked Trumps rhetoric and less because they held populist beliefs.

Now with Trump defeated, at least until the 2024 election cycle when he is cleared to run again, Democrats are speaking about unity and offering to work with Republicans who distance themselves from Trump. Corporate Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, and John Kasich are promising Trump was a fluke who does not represent the party and distancing themselves rapidly from populism.

This narrative concludes that without Trump in the spotlight, conservative populists will lose interest, and make their way back to the corporate GOP, or perhaps back into political nonparticipation.

A related theory is that populism always belonged to the left, most notably to big-name progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and AOC. This theory posits that populism is relegated to the realm of Wall Street regulation, transfer payments, and infrastructure spending. It asserts that the natural manifestation of anti-elitist sentiment is progressive left-wing populism and the right has no real business drumming up populist sentiment.

Proponents of this narrative can point to the fact that it has historically been progressives who have been hammering away about the wealth gap and inequality for years. Now, with Biden-Harris in the White House and progressive voices like Warren and Sanders dragging the party leftward on economic issues, the GOP should stay in its place.

These topical arguments are extremely compelling to both parties, who are understandably looking forward to returning to their status-quo roles and activities.

DEMOCRATS WOULD LIKE TO RECOUP THE PRO-WORKING CLASS POPULIST IDENTITY (AND SEVERAL MIDWESTERN STATES), AND CORPORATIST REPUBLICANS SEEM ALL TOO HAPPY TO HAND POPULISM BACK TO THE LEFT AND RETURN TO FIGHTING DOMESTIC SPENDING AND EXPANDING THE MILITARY.

New York Timescolumnist Ross Douthats recent op-ed How Trump ate Populism sums up both arguments perfectly. Douthat argues that populism was a movement defined entirely by Trump, and that Trump,was defining, in his own selfish and demagogic way, what a conservative populism meant.

Reducing populism to its economic core Douthat argues that the right has never been successful at integrating working-class populist policies into its platform: the American right doesnt usually move leftward on economics in a thoughtful, coherent and sustainable way that the move is usually ad hoc, undercooked and cheerfully unprincipled, which makes it more likely to be abandoned once the party is out of power, treated as rubble instead of a foundation.

Douthat concludes that,over the next few years, this will have two likely implications for the rights sincere economic populists. First, they will watch the Biden administration poach issues that they once hoped to own, from big tax breaks for families to big spending on domestic infrastructure. Second, they will watch their party nominate self-proclaimed populists, in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Arkansas that should be the base for a working-class conservatism, who are just acolytes for the cult of Trumpwith a policy agenda condensed to owning the libs and dog whistling to the QAnoners.

There is a possibility, or perhaps a risk, that Douthats predictions for right-wing populism are correct. It is certainly a neat and tidy narrative: populism can be reduced to traditionally left-wing economic policies, and with a Democrat president and Democrat-controlled House and Senate, Democrats can easily charter a path as the real economic populists. Republicans, to remain relevant, will revert back to opposing Democrats, and the cycle will spin on.

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Where does this leave the working-class coalition of conservative populists who were Trumps strongest supporters?

The working-class blue-collar coalition that elected Trump based on his America first platform is not just going to disappear. Assuming these voters will quietly rejoin the corporatist GOP is optimistic, to say the least. Significant numbers of Trumps white-no college supporters in both 2016 and 2020 were political newcomers, disenfranchised Americans who chose to vote for Trump because he spoke directly to their needs. Trump remains extremely popular in polling withwhite no college, with men, with Midwesterners, and with middle income Americans.

The latest YouGov survey shows 37 percent of Americans think Trump should run again, and that number climbs to 44 percent among men and53 percent among white men without a college degree, though a substantial 49 percent of white menwitha college degree also support him running again. As with previous polling, middle-income Americans support Trumps next bid at the highest rate. Forty-seven percent of those making between $50K and $100K annually support Trump running again, compared to 31 percent of those making under $50K and 35 percent of those making over $100K.

Trumps support remains highest in the Midwest and South where 43 percent and 41 percent support him running again, compared to 32 percent in the West and 30 percent in the Northeast. What is more, 38 percent of Independents want Trump to run again, as do 27 percent of moderates. Thirty-six percent of Americans overall maintain that Biden did not legitimately win the election, and that climbs to 39 percent of men and 49 percent of white men without a degree, though 43 percent of white men with a degree feel this way too.

Of course, these numbers tell only the story of Trumps popularity, but do white working-class Americans lean populist on real issues? The answer appears to be, a lot do. The same YouGov survey shows widespread support among equal or larger shares of core Trump supporter groups for proposals including the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid package, and the $1400 stimulus checks. Sixty-four percent of Americans somewhat or strongly support the aid package, including 60 percent of men, 56 percent of white men without a degree, and 51 percent of white men with a degree. Note the breakdown there white menwithouta degree (core Trump supporters) support the stimulus bill at a higher rate than white menwitha degree. Not a surprise from an economic perspective, but somewhat of a shift from a political one.

RELATED | Donald Trump Acquitted By U.S. Senate Again

Support for the aid package is highest among the lowest income groups, with 73 percent of those making under $50K a year supporting it, compared to 57 percent of middle-income groups and 56% of higher income groups. It is supported by 32 percent of Republicans, 32 percent of conservatives, and 59 percent of Independents. The stimulus checks are supported by 79 percent of Americans, including 76 percent of men, and 73 percent of white men without a degree compared to 71 percent of white men with a degree. Strong support for the stimulus checks is highest in the Midwest, with 43 percent strongly approving of them and 80 percent net approving of them.

Most notably, 61 percent of Trump voters support the stimulus checks, as do 63 percent of Republicans, and 59 percent of conservatives.

Now, these are unprecedented economic times, with states shutting down entire sectors of the economy in response to the coronavirus, and rising Republican and conservative acceptance of increased government spending and aid could be more a sign of desperation than it is an ideological shift. However, the numbers are clear: increasing shares of Trumps core supporters are open to, and in fact supportive of, government solutions.

However, what analysts on both the left and right seem to miss is this

ECONOMICS IS ONLY ONE PIECE OF A MUCH MORE NUANCED SET OF PRIORITIES FOR CONSERVATIVE POPULISTS.

While populism has a core economic imperative, it also has a cultural one. Populists on the right are staunchly pro-American and anti-globalism. They dont want to merely benefit from wealth redistribution schemes or up infrastructure spending, although they are not as opposed to these ideas as the vigilant libertarian wing of the GOP.

What populists seek is for political leaders to put American citizens first and that is something the Biden administration, the Democrat Party, and the Establishment GOP, are not doing.

IF THERE IS A PLACE ON THE RIGHT FOR POPULISM IT IS IN THAT PRECISE AREA: OPPOSING GLOBALISM AND EMBRACING AN AMERICA FIRST SET OF PRIORITIES.

Populists want to reestablish a robust American manufacturing sector, and incentivize corporations to keep jobs inside the United States instead of offshoring, they want to cut foreign aid, reduce foreign intervention andbring American troops home.

Populists want to see politicians follow in Trumps footsteps and continue to restructure trade deals in the U.S.s favor. In 2020 Trump signed a new trade dealthat forced China to commit to buying an additional $200 billion worth of American goodsand services by 2021, while maintaining most of the tariffs he placed on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods. Populists want more of that kind of thinking.

Populists want to pull out of dubious international agreements like the Paris Climate Accord that punishes the U.S. while forcing taxpayers tosubsidize polluting countries like China and Indiajust to get them to participate.

Populists want to deport illegal aliens whose first act on American soil was to break the law, and they want to ensure a strong border and a legal immigration system. Populists want a robust police force, and they want to ensure the fundamental rights to life and property are protected.

Sure, maybe populists want to up teacher pay or weigh the pros of domestic spending projects now and again. But what many populists are looking for long-term is not necessarily a handout, but the removal of the vast number of anti-American policies stacked against the average citizen.

The core of conservative populism is putting America first, rejecting globalism, and restoring a nation where politicians work for the people. It is about much more than transfer payments or tax cuts.

WHAT LEFTWING POPULISTS FAIL TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT THEIR GLOBALIST PRIORITIES ARE ACTUALLY HURTING THE POPULISTS WHO SUPPORT THEM, AND THIS IS WHERE THE RIGHT CAN DIFFERENTIATE ITSELF WITH AN AMERICA-FIRST AGENDA.

If there is a place on the right for conservative populists, it is a place where they successfully differentiate themselves from the globalists and corporatists on the left and the right and demand a domestic agenda that puts the American people first.

(Via: Provided)

Bill Wilsonis the President of the Market Research Foundation and a former board member and former president of Americans for Limited Government. His column, reprinted with permission,originally appearedon the Market Research Foundation website.

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Guest Column: Is There A Place For Conservative Populism In America? - FITSNews

In November of last year, Donald Trump lost the presidential election with the highest number of votes for a Republican candidate ever and the second-highest for a presidential candidate. Only Joe Biden did better. Trump also managed to garner the second-highest share of the non-white vote, 26%. Only George W. Bush outdid him, winning 28% in 2004, as a number of commentaries, seeking to diminish Trumps feat, have pointed out. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is the fact that the two candidates were very different. Bush had many flaws, but race-baiting was not among them.

Against that, by the time of the 2020 election, there was a wealth of evidence that racial revanchism was central to President Trumps political agenda. This, however, did not prevent a significant number of minority voters from casting their ballots for him. Whether or not this made a difference is an interesting question. In some cases, it might have, most notably in Texas.

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To be sure, Biden won the vast majority of the Hispanic vote in the big cities like Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Trump, however, did surprisingly well in the heavily Latino counties in southern Texas along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. In Starr county, for instance, which is almost completely Hispanic, Trump gained more than 55% of the vote compared to 2016. These results, as neutral observers have charged, ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.

Ahead of the election, Democrats had high hopes that this time, the emerging Democratic majority was finally going to materialize. The notion goes back to the title of a book from 2002, written by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. In it, the authors argued that the future belonged to the Democrats, for a number of reasons. There was the transformation of Americas demography, there were secular ideological changes going in a progressive direction, and there was, last but not least, the growing socioeconomic and sociocultural dominance of large metropolitan areas, rooted in the growth of a postindustrial economy what Teixeira called ideopolises, organized around ideas and services.

The idea was that the Democrats were in a better position than the Republicans to appeal to the diverse constituencies emerging from these developments: on the one hand, the growing ranks of professionals in the high-tech, finance, education, law and medical sectors, a growing number of them women; on the other, ancillary services, such as sales clerks, waiters, janitors, security personnel and teachers aides, a large number of them Hispanics and African Americans. Together, Teixeira suggested, they formed powerful coalitions that now dominate the politics of many ideopolises united in their support of a politics of tolerance and openness.

In the meantime, much ink has been spilled over the crucial socioeconomic and sociocultural importance of metropolitan areas, largely confirming Teixeiras assessment. Todays global cities such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo generate a significant part of their respective nations wealth. At the same time, however, they also represent quasi self-contained entities increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country.

This is a problem, for in the process, the hinterland, which at one time played a crucial role as a supplier of myriads of inputs from small and medium-sized companies, has largely become structurally irrelevant to the metropolitan economy. With it went the middle-class labor force that was the backbone of what once was known as Americas heartland but is today disparaged as flyover country, its inhabitants dismissed as deplorable and repellent racist, sexist, homophobic ignoramuses. Proof: Why else would they have voted for somebody like Trump?

After roughly two decades since the book was published, the emerging Democratic majority has still not fully materialized. Instead, what we have got are two antagonistic political tribes whose seemingly irreconcilable differences have polarized American politics along a wide range of fault lines: views on immigration, reproductive choice, gender, Black Lives Matter, gun control, affordable health care, social security the list goes on. This divides grand signifier in todays politics is Donald Trump. As unbelievable as it might sound given he lost the election, given he was impeached twice, given he left the office scorned and disgraced his legacy continues to haunt post-Trump politics and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

According to a recent representative survey, around 80% of Republicans continue to have a favorable view of Donald Trump; more than 70% believe that the charge that the former president incited the assault on the US Capitol on January 6 is untrue; and almost two-thirds believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It fits that according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll, conducted after Trumps acquittal in the Senate, three-quarters of Republican respondents said they wished Trump would continue to play a big role in the GOP. So much for those who think Trump will somehow fade away into oblivion.

Trump won in 2016 because he quite skillfully managed to articulate, appeal and respond to a range of diffuse popular grievances, accorded them legitimacy and, in the process, gave the impression that he listened and not only understood, but empathized with them reminiscent of Bill Clintons well-known I feel your pain from 1992. Even if Trump should miraculously disappear from the American political scene, Trumpism, as The Washington Posts conservative commentator Gary Abernathy has recently maintained, Trumpism is the GOPs future. If this indeed should be the case, it means that the chances for the emergence of a Democratic majority are likely to be as bleak as they have been over the past two decades.

The notion of an emerging Democratic majority is premised on the idea that certain groups in society, most notably the highly educated, visible minorities, women and sexual minorities, qua their subordinate socioeconomic and sociocultural position have a natural affinity for a certain type of politics. Any deviation is either seen as a result of false consciousness, a failure to get with the program or, worse, simple betrayal of the cause, as the singer Madonna charged in 2016. A case in point was Barak Obamas attack on Hispanics who voted for the incumbent in 2020, accusing them of ignoring Trumps track record of race-baiting.

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The same applies to all the white women who voted for Trump, despite his record of routinely disparaging and denigrating women. As Sarah Jaffe has put it in an article for the New Labor Forum, no single fact about the 2016 election was more confounding than the fact that Trumps margin of victory included a slim majority of white women voters. Things were even worse in 2020. While Trump lost some support among white men, his support among white women remained virtually unchanged.

Political parties, particularly in two-party systems such as the United States, have to assemble a coalition of disparate groups. A case in point was the Democratic Party, which for a long time managed to hold together two factions, one from the South and the other from the Northeast, that were fundamentally at loggerheads over major issues such as civil rights. Behind the idea of the emerging Democratic majority is the expectation that it is possible to put together a coalition on the basis of shared values and shared aspirations, derived from shared experiences of a lack of recognition, if not outright discrimination.

Twenty years ago, this was a reasonable expectation, given the direction of social, and particularly demographic, change. The populist surge that has swept over the United States during the past decade or so, however, has fundamentally altered the logic of electoral choice. Populist mobilization derives its logic not from shared values and aspirations, but from disparate grievances and the perceived unresponsiveness of the political establishment to these grievances.

Successful populist protagonists are not successful because they come up with elaborate blueprints for profound socioeconomic change, but because they absorb and reflect myriads of disparate grievances and give them a voice. More often than not, populist politics are not about the future but a glorified past, reflecting the surge of nostalgia that has become a hallmark of the current age, further enhanced and intensified by COVID-19.

There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. In fact, new studies show that nostalgia can be a beneficial mechanism helpful to coping with a difficult situation. It becomes dangerous, however, when it provokes an aggressive response. This, it seems, is what has happened in recent years among parts of the American public or, at least, that is what the recent survey mentioned earlier suggests. In response to the statement that the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it, more than a third of respondents agreed either completely (11%) or somewhat (25%).

In light of the events of January 6, this is quite alarming. But it jibes with the findings of a recent study of MAGA supporters, who to a significant extent consist of white Christian males beyond retirement age. Full of resentment toward assertive women no longer willing to take shit from men, African Americans seen as not trying hard enough and immigrants accused of changing American culture for the worse, they epitomize this kind of radical political nostalgia.

Nostalgia in terms of a yearning for the status quo ante might to a certain extent explain why a majority of white women voted for Trump. More often than not, grievances stem from changes that individuals perceive as having been imposed on them. A classic case is the construction of nuclear power plants, which in the past gave rise to massive popular resistance and contributed to the rise of Green parties. In the current situation in the United States, grievances stem to a significant extent from both demographic change and the increased visibility of minorities who refuse to remain silent.

When white women voted for Donald Trump, it was because what has been happening over the past years is a fundamental challenge to the existing racial hierarchy that had been taken for granted. A vote for Trump was a vote for maintaining a tenuous status quo, where white women might be second-class with respect to gender but first-class with respect to race. The same logic certainly does not apply to black voters supporting Trump, a majority of whom were black men. It also does not apply to Hispanics, whose diverse background (Mexican, Cuban, Central American, etc.) makes it even more difficult to come up with a common denominator. Religious considerations, particularly with respect to reproductive choice and gender issues, certainly played a significant role, as did the perception that neither party cares about their concerns.

What has been emerging over the past decades is a new constellation of political contest, pitting substance-based politics grounded in reasoned deliberation and values, however flawed, against grievance-based politics fueled by anger and resentment. This is hardly confined to the United States. Western Europe has been struggling with this phenomenon and its fallout for decades. Yet given its peculiar system, the United States is in a unique position to serve as a laboratory to see how these dynamics play themselves out. One might wish that the vision behind the notion of the emerging Democratic majority will ultimately carry the day.

Nietzschean skepticism informed by the notion of human, all too human calls for caution. Trump might be finished politically. His spirit, however, is alive and well, capable of causing mischief to no end. Trumps recent full-front attack on Mitch McConnell is a foretaste of things to come. It portends an attempt to completely transform the GOP into a radical right-wing populist party, devoid of any kind of real substance in other words, a replica writ large of the Great Leader.

*[Fair Observer is amediapartner of theCentre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

Read the rest here:

What Happened to the Emerging Democratic Majority? - Fair Observer

(Repeats without change. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters)

* Fund positioning on CME silver contract: https://tmsnrt.rs/2LiXUNw

By Andy Home

LONDON, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Robinhood's army of small retail investors may have failed to storm the silver market, but the online broker's devotees certainly gave it an almighty shake.

The spot silver price surged by 20% between last Thursday and Monday this week, briefly hitting an eight-year high of $30.03 an ounce.

An increase in the margin required to trade silver on the CME exchange has curbed animal spirits and the metal has fallen back to $27.12, though a collective stampede for physical metal continues to deplete retail supplies of bars and coins.

The crowd has found that squeezing a commodity market such as silver is a very different proposition from cornering a short-seller in an individual stock such as GameStop. Particularly when the targeted big short doesn't exist.

They'll probably be back again, though, in silver or the next big thing.

Crowd surges organised through social media regularly rock Chinese commodity markets and the strategy is starting to catch on in the West, even if this particular silver squeeze seems to be fizzling out.

THE BIG SHORT

The rallying call for an attack on the silver market came on Thursday in the form of a post on the r/wallstreetbets Reddit message board, the same one used to spark frenzied buying of GameStop and other shares shorted by hedge funds.

The post urged investors to buy physical silver via exchange-traded fund (ETF) iShares Silver Trust SLV, the shares of which represent ounces of silver sitting in vaults.

Retail investors heeded the call and snapped up 37 million ounces worth of shares in the next 24 hours, with others rushing to their local bullion dealers.

But who is the "biggest short"?

Not the hedge funds that were targeted by Reddit traders in the stock market. The fund community has been net long of the CME silver contract since the middle of 2019.

Story continues

Ironically, the silver squeeze may have benefited the very funds that have come in for vilification for shorting stocks.

That counterintuitive outcome seems to have sapped morale among the core Reddit crowd, with many questioning whom they are supposed to be squeezing.

SILVER REVOLUTION

Chasing the big silver short has sucked the Robinhood stocks army into a whole different world of precious metals conspiracy theory and radical populism.

This is a world populated by those who believe that Wall Street is in cahoots with the U.S. government to keep the price of gold and silver artificially suppressed to protect the existing economic order.

"Big banks have made big fortunes by manipulating the silver market for decades," said the #SilverSqueeze Manifesto.

"This is a movement to help level the playing field between everyday people and the billionaires who control the big financial institutions that control the money, and thus control us," it said, adding that the silver market is "the Achilles heel of the old system, and its time has come".

PAPER METAL

This belief that the likes of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are using futures short positions to suppress the price of physical metal has been around a long time.

It is based on a binary world view that paper transactions contradict physical reality.

Commodity markets operate more holistically than that, however, with transactions in the futures market often deriving from the need to hedge holdings of the physical commodity.

The Reddit crowd may have bought up 37 million ounces of silver in one day last week, but at the end of December there were another 33,608 tonnes of the stuff sitting in London vaults, according to the London Bullion Market Association.

That's more than a billion ounces valued at $28.6 billion. That stockpile is continuously being borrowed, lent, bought and sold as banks interact with the industrial supply chain and the investment sector. Given its value, all of it will be hedged.

The biggest short on the CME silver contract is not the hedge fund community but the 52,750 contracts held in the "producer/merchant/processor/user" category.

The big paper short, in other words, is a big physical long. Squeeze it too hard and industrial quantities of silver may be coming your way.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

While the Robinhood army's energies seem spent for now, the ability of the crowd to move prices, even in markets as globally deep as silver, has been amply demonstrated. And some early movers on the silver squeeze will have made large profits.

Chinese retail investors have been using the same mass effect for many years, coordinating surges in WeChat rooms.

The crowd moves from one hot market to the next, using its strength in numbers to generate a giant momentum machine. The target is often less important than the potential to catch a moving trend.

The Zhengzhou ferro-silicon contract was squeezed in 2019 simply because retail traders had been pushed out of the bigger steel market by exchange margin increases.

Shanghai copper has been crowd-shorted a couple of times in the past few years, in one instance in a collective battle of strength against a major fund long position.

Social media facilitates the same bewildering mix of mutual exhortation, snippets of genuine information and lots of wild rumour-mongering, as is evident in the #SilverSqueeze meme.

The phenomenon is spreading. In South Korea they're called "ants". In Thailand they're called "moths". There's a lot of people in this world of low interest rates looking to make a fast buck in the markets.

Chinese regulators have been battling the problem for years. The first line of defence is to increase trading fees, the second is to issue increasingly strident government warnings and the third is to intervene directly, either by suspending some types of trade or mobilising a team of state-owned banks to crush the crowd.

CME's margin hike and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's pending meeting with regulators to discuss recent market volatility conform to the standard Chinese operating procedure of how to deal with speculative excess.

Western regulators will need to catch up fast with their Chinese counterparts because the retail army is likely to resurface with new tactics.

"Reddit's Wall Street Bets community (...) has set a shining example that other movements can follow," according to #SqueezeSilver Manifesto's anonymous author.

"A dedicated army of everyday people can leverage their collective skills and resources (...) to alter deeply entrenched power dynamics and level the playing field."

Small investors from Shanghai to Seattle may well agree.

(Editing by David Goodman)

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RPT-COLUMN-Populist crowd fails to breach the silver fortress for now: Andy Home - Yahoo Finance

We have lots of wonderful people who have been doing amazing work, trying to work in their communities, Frankenberry continues. Itd be helpful if these folks would, you know, send us the money to help us support those organizations instead of just putting billboards up or radio ads that dont have any input from West Virginians. Were fully capable of communicating with our people.

West Virginia Cant Waits Smith agrees and argues the real task for those hoping both to push Manchin and change the states political landscape long-term will be building out a local organizational infrastructure that can sustain itself after and beyond campaign season. A couple of billboards or out-of-state TV ads arent going to move these folks because they can ignore it and wait, knowing that that energy will leave come election time, he says. But the long-term building of political infrastructure, like whats happened over the last 10 years in Arizona and Georgia and other places, is the kind of thing that will move politicians in the short run because they know their political future is in jeopardy if they dont.

Smith also sees this as the key to winning Manchins support on structural reforms, including the elimination of the Senate filibuster and statehood for the District of Columbia. If his vote will be won at all, itll be won not through arguments about reforms in and of themselves but through West Virginia voters coming to understand reform lies between them and passing the policies that actually animate them. Were hearing some of the same things from allies inside and outside West Virginia who want to turn this into a wonky debate about 51 votes or 52 votes, and how do we do this or how do we do that, he says. And our experience is that those debates are largely academiceven if you win them in the public sphere, they dont actually affect the way power operates. Power will respond to a direct threat.

Smith says the threat to Manchin is compounded by the number of West Virginians who feel disaffected from both parties. Although outsiders have come to think of West Virginia as a red state in recent years, it wasnt so long ago that the states Democratic Party comprised its political establishmentuntil 2014, Smith notes, it had held full control of the states legislature for over 80 years. And before the election of Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginias junior senator, in 2014, the state hadnt elected a Republican to the chamber since 1956.

See original here:

The Grassroots Organizers Hoping to Move Manchin in a More Populist Direction - The New Republic

For those who flirted with parts of the ex-presidents populist message, there is a straightforward line of defense: While Trump obviously failed, real Trumpism was never tried.

The problem was the deeply flawed, unhinged and amoral champion of the populist cause, but not the cause itself, which continues to be relevant. As my AEI colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty writes, political conditions will continue to call for a Trumpist response for some time.

Trumps idiosyncrasies surely go a long way toward accounting for the wholesale failure of his policy agenda, as well as for his disgraceful departure from office. But conservatives have to confront the possibility that populism itself was an important component of the failureand indeed that any populist politics carries the seeds of policy failure.

The proposition will not sit easily with those who, in the wake of the Trump disaster, are seeking to rehabilitate the term. According to the American Compass Oren Cass, for example, theres a way in which populism also means taking seriously the concerns that people have, understanding that they will not all express them in the same terms a Beltway debate might.

But populism has a commonly agreed-upon definition: Namely, it is a type of politics that pits good and pure-hearted ordinary people against a self-serving, out-of-touch elite. As such, populism is inherently divisive as it singles out specific groups as distinct from the people (elites, immigrants, bankers, journalists). It is anti-pluralist as it treats the people as a homogenous entity. Finally, it has a penchant for authoritarianism: If one takes Trumps I am your voice seriously, why should there be any limits to the power of the presidency?

Moreover, through its Manichean nature, populism introduces passions into politicsas opposed to an interplay between interests and abstract principles. And passions are only rarely useful for threading the needle on public policy. In fact, if stirring passions becomes the aim of politics, policy outcomes take a back seat. Neither the border wall, nor the Muslim ban, nor any other of the ex-presidents signature policy ideas were instrumental to achieving any real-world objectives, such as helping those who helped to elect him. Instead, their sole purpose was to keep the audience engaged and emotionally invested in the populist spectacle.

Furthermore, the debate on the future role of populism within the Republican party ought not to be limited to lessons from the Trump era. The bigger picture is not an encouraging one. For every Israel under Benjamin Netanyahus leadership, there is a Hungary under Viktor Orbn, suffering from brain drain and dismantling its democratic institutionsor an India under Narendra Modi, gripped by social unrest and economic dysfunction.

In the GOP alone, recent manifestations go from Pat Buchanan through Sarah Palin and the Tea Party to Trump. Instead of yielding a governing strategy, the partys attempts to embrace populism were akin to efforts to ride a tigerbefore being eaten by it, like Eric Cantor or Lindsey Graham. Perhaps the tiger could be tamed, as the former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May hoped with her efforts to reshape the Tories as a party of responsible nationalismonly to see herself be overrun by ever more extreme fringes.

It should not be too much to ask those who wish to keep populism as a lasting hallmark of conservative and Republican politics to address populisms real-world record, instead of retreating to a purely abstract defense of politics that would supposedly take the concerns of working-class Americans more seriously than the Beltway elites. Yet, much like Soviet elites of the 1970s and the 1980s, who were not keen to defend the track record of real socialism, the high priests of populism today are keen to sell us a promise of an idealized populism to come, instead of accepting accountability for any of the mess that real populism of the past decade helped create.

There are important policy conversations to be had on the political rightand the leftabout subjects such as immigration or industrial policy. But with its appeal to passions and grievance, populism is the worst possible vehicle for policy change.

In Denmark, the left-of-center government of Mette Frederiksen is seeking without much ado to drive the number of asylum claims to zero, following years of restrictive immigration policy by Social Democrats. Any number of conservative, right-wing, or free-market-friendly governmentsnot least the Reagan administration in the United States or Margaret Thatchers government in the U.K.have provided assistance to specific industries or protected them from foreign competition. Whatever one thinks of the merits of such policies, populism and the pursuit of the substantive agenda advocated by those who want the GOP to be a party of the working class are perfectly separable.

If anything, populism makes thoughtful conversations on immigration, industrial policy, or social safety nets essentially impossible. On both sides of the Atlantic, the combination of the divisive us-versus-them rhetoric of populism on the political right with demands to curb immigration has been a surefire way to attract racists. And combining populism with an expansive view of the states role in the economy has been a one-way ticket to irresponsible, short-sighted economic policy mixesas the legacy of economic populism in Latin America demonstrates.

By all means, let us judge each policy idea on its merits and leave no stone unturned. Yet insofar as insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, to seek to perpetuate the GOPs populism in the wake of the Trump disaster would be positively insane.

Dalibor Rohac is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. Follow him on Twitter @DaliborRohac.

Original post:

The Problems With Populism Go Well Beyond Donald Trump - The Dispatch

WASHINGTON Josh Holmes spent much of Wednesday in Washington watching the populist uprising over GameStop in the stock market with fascination and a growing sense of familiarity.

He has seen this movie before.

Holmes, president of the issue management firm Cavalry, is best known as the former chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Holmes has spent his career among the Republican establishment, which has spent the past five years getting steamrolled by the populist force of Trumpism a grassroots movement that stormed the ramparts of the GOP, ousted the establishment and remade the party in its image.

Almost no one in the party saw it coming. When it did, few of the establishment players understood just how vast the force was that suddenly lined up against them.

On Wednesday morning, as GameStop shares continued to surge, Holmes took to Twitter and typed out a simple message: "Wall Street, welcome to our world."

I called him to ask what he meant by that. "This is an event," he explained. "This is a social and economic moment in our society. There are a few times when you can definitely point to a moment and say society has changed, and this is one of them."

There are a few times when you can definitely point to a moment and say society has changed, and this is one of them.

Josh Holmes

former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell

There are scores of similarities between former President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement and the GameStop surge. There is a sense of fighting back against disrespect of the elites, belief that systemic rules have been written to benefit insiders at the expense of regular people, and new internet technologies that widely distribute power that was once held exclusively by a small group.

There's a healthy dose of skepticism of the media, and a belief in fake news. And both movements are inspired by viral memes funny, angry and engaging images depicting the movement as engaged in a heroic struggle.

Before the bell Thursday, GameStop shares briefly eclipsed a previously unthinkable $500, more than the share prices of Apple, Goldman Sachs and General Motors. After trading opened, the stock jumped more than 6% to about $370 a share. GameStop shares were worth about $40 a week ago.

The Reddit forum WallStreetBets on a smartphone arranged in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021.

Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images

But the most important similarity is the bravado of the members of the movement. On a Reddit forum Wednesday, users cheered each other on, urging "Hold the line, boys!" and "buy and hold!"

One user, named "ishabwa," wrote "THE OLD GUARD IS HORRIFIED. BACKS AGAINST THE WALL. PAINTED INTO A CORNER. ITS ALL BECAUSE OF YOU." Another described this moment as the GameStop "revolution" and wrote: "This is our chance to stick it to those who never took us seriously. Either we forge economic history or loose it all, I'm willing to take this risk."

Scouring those same Reddit message boards, entrepreneur William LeGate felt like he had seen this happen before, too.

But he uses a different touchstone: Occupy Wall Street, the left-leaning anti-establishment movement that blossomed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

"This is Occupy Wall Street Part 2, but this time it is on their turf, and there are real financial consequences," he said. LeGate, who received a $100,000 Thiel fellowship to drop out of college and start a company when he was 18 years old in 2013, has been watching the WallStreetBets Reddit discussion for several years.

He said he is seeing increasing frustration and anger, which is exploding in the Covid pandemic era and it is bringing together the traditional political left and right.

"People were willing to take a risk on Trump and now they're willing to take a risk in the markets," he said. "A lot of people just want to see the world burn right now, and they're enjoying watching it happen."

He said he's already seeing people on the WallStreetBets Reddit page looking for new targets and there are two themes. First, they're looking for highly shorted stocks where big hedge funds might have a lot of leverage. And second, they're looking for nostalgia plays to bring back the companies from their youth. That's why Nokia, Blackberry and Blockbuster are all getting attention.

Wall Street investors are going to have to factor in a new set of risks. "The risk assessment that they're going to have to make is this: is this a meme-able stock that a bunch of kids on Reddit could hit and blow up the price?" LeGate said.

But what explains that nostalgic impulse in the midst of a revolution? It is the same emotion that animated the MAGA movement which, after all, stood for make America great, again. It is a desire to return to an earlier time that the members of the movement remember as better than today.

"There's a feeling I sense across society that people want to go back to a simpler time," LeGate said. "No one likes Covid. People don't feel the economy is fair. Everything looks better in hindsight."

And he argues that efforts to regulate trading will feel to Reddit traders more like suppression, and could fuel more anger.

"If someone on Main Street loses half their portfolio in a day, nothing's going to happen. But if a hedge fund does, they literally stop the trading," he said. "I myself question whether this is really about protecting the individual investor or protecting the hedge fund."

Holmes believes the key to understanding the power of this new movement is the gamification of investing melded with an anti-elite fervor. Sticking it to hedge funds and potentially making a lot of money is, simply, fun. And if you believe its also the right thing to do, and thrive on the engagement of a community of like-minded traders, so much the better.

Josh Holmes, chief of staff for presumptive Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., attends a rally at the airport in Bowling Green, Ky., November 3, 2014.

Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

"When things really get going is when the fun meets the purpose," Holmes said. "This is the perfect storm of those two."

His warning to Wall Street is: understand this. Be willing to scrutinize yourself. This not going away, and it is probably bigger than you think.

"People need to take the time to understand the social dynamics of this. What are the problems that have created this class of retail investor who seek to completely destroy your industry, and how do you remedy that?" Holmes said.

Holmes said he has spent the past decade watching American politics turned inside out. An earlier generation of politicians spent their time raising money at country club ballrooms from hundreds of donors writing $500 or $1,000 checks.

But now they spend their time on the internet raising money from millions of donors making $5 and $20 contributions. In politics, the retail money turned out to be bigger much bigger -- than the institutional money. And that's driven massive political spending inflation: the big Senate campaigns that once cost $15 million now cost $100 million.

"The pool is unlimited," Holmes said. "And that's the problem. The volume of potential participants is a hell of a lot bigger than people think it is, and it is certainly a lot bigger than the number of people who participated in this."

Other establishment Republican veterans agree.

"Don't underestimate the very real anger and sense of grievance and the very justified sense of grievance among the American people," said Michael Steel, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies who was a senior advisor to the Jeb Bush presidential campaign in 2016. Understanding that, he said, can help investors understand who the next targets of Reddit rage might be, and how extensive the new movement is.

Kevin Madden, a former advisor to Mitt Romney, said, "anger can oftentimes be a more potent force than ideas. Those who felt they belonged to a political party of ideas found that grassroots anger, which can be very intoxicating, took over the political marketplace. It can also take over a financial marketplace."

Madden recalled the way populism overtook the Republican presidential primary in 2016.

Kevin Madden, then senior advisor and spokesman for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, talks with reporters aboard the campaign plane on October 23, 2012 en route to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

"One of the mistakes an establishment can make at the beginning is thinking this is someone else's fight. Marco Rubio says this is a Jeb Bush problem, and Jeb Bush says this is a Rick Perry problem," he said. "They all believed this was someone else's fight, and they all paid a huge price. That force redefined the party in its image for potentially the next decade."

Together these Republican strategists see Melvin Capital's decision to close out its GameStop position and take an enormous loss this week as something akin to the victory of populist Republicans in driving the establishment Republican House leader Eric Cantor from office in Virginia in 2014. It was an early demonstration of power. And it was a precursor to the much more dramatic events to come in 2016 and in 2021.

LeGate, the WallStreetBets watcher, agrees.

"It's a really powerful message," he said. "I think this is the first wave of what's going to happen."

But LeGate said he didn't buy any GameStop stock himself, for fear of an SEC investigation into his viral tweets about the movement.

Instead, he said, he is 100% invested in cryptocurrencies.

Read more:

Republicans in Washington warn Wall Street: The GameStop populists are more powerful than you think - CNBC