Daily Archives: March 31, 2021

President Bidens American Rescue Plan is incredibly popular, even among Republican voters. We dont have details yet on the next big Democratic initiative, but we can expect it to poll well, because we know that it will combine major infrastructure spending with tax hikes on corporations and the rich which are all popular things.

But like the rescue plan, the next plan probably wont get a single Republican vote in Congress. Why are elected Republicans still so committed to right-wing economic policies that help the rich while shortchanging the working class?

Fair warning: Im not going to offer a good answer to this question. The point of todays article is, instead, to argue for the questions importance.

I ask why Republicans are still committed to right-wing economics because in the past there wasnt any puzzle about their position.

Like many observers, I used to have a Whats the matter with Kansas? model of the G.O.P. That is, like Thomas Frank, the author of the 2004 book with that title, I saw the Republican Party essentially as an enterprise run by and for plutocrats that managed to win elections by playing to the cultural grievances and racial hostility of working-class whites. Bigotry, however, was mainly a show put on for the rubes; the party would go back to its pro-rich priorities as soon as each election was over.

The classic example came when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as Americas defender against gay married terrorists, then followed his victory by announcing that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didnt.)

But that feels like a long time ago.

Billionaires may have started the Republican Party on its march toward extremism, but theyve clearly lost control of the forces they conjured up. The G.O.P. can no longer put intolerance back in the closet after each election so as to focus on the real business of tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, the extremists are in charge. Despite a lost election and a violent insurrection, whats left of the old Republican establishment has abased itself on the altar of Trumpism.

But while power in the Republican Party has shifted almost completely away from the conservative establishment, the party is still committed to an economic ideology of tax and spending cuts. And its not obvious why.

When Donald Trump rolled over establishment candidates in 2016, it seemed possible that he would lead his party toward what some political scientists call Herrenvolk democracy, policies that are genuinely populist and even egalitarian but only for members of the right racial and ethnic groups.

South Africa under apartheid worked that way. There were limited gestures toward whites-only populism in the Jim Crow U.S. South. In Europe, Frances National Front combines hostility to immigrants with calls for an expansion of the nations already generous welfare state.

As a candidate, Trump often sounded as if he wanted to move in that direction, promising not to cut social benefits and to begin a large infrastructure program. If he had honored those promises, if he had shown any hint of genuine populism, he might still be president. In practice, however, his tax cut and his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare were right out of the standard conservative playbook.

The exception that proves the rule was Trumps farm policy, which involved huge subsidies to farmers hurt by his trade war, but managed to give almost all of those subsidies to whites. The point is that there was nothing like this on a broader level.

Was Trumps continuation of unpopular economic policies simply a reflection of his personal ignorance and lack of interest in substance? Events since the election suggest not.

Ive already mentioned lock-step Republican opposition to Bidens relief package. Rejection of economic populism is also apparent at the state level. Consider Missouri. One of its senators, Josh Hawley, has declared that Republicans must be a working-class party, not a Wall Street party. Yet Republicans in the states legislature just blocked funding for an expansion in Medicaid that would cost the state very little and has already been approved by a majority of voters.

Or consider West Virginia, where another unfulfilled Trump promise, to revive the coal industry, resonated with voters. Coal isnt coming back; so the states Republican governor is proposing to boost the economy by eliminating income taxes. This echoes the failed Kansas tax cut experiment a few years ago. Why imagine it would work any better in Appalachia?

So whats going on? I suspect that the absence of true populism on the right has a lot to do with the closing of the right-wing mind: the conservative establishment may have lost power, but its apparatchiks are still the only people in the G.O.P. who know anything about policy. And big money may still buy influence even in a party whose energy comes mainly from intolerance and hate.

In any case, for now Republican politicians are doing Democrats a big favor, clinging to discredited economic ideas that even their own supporters dislike.

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Opinion | Why Cant Republicans Be Populists? - The New York Times

Rabobank says conditions remain ideal for populist leaders to thrive, one of many challenges faced by worlds exporters

The defeat of former U.S. president Donald Trump and the fading fortunes of a few populist heavyweights isnt the same as the decline of populism, says a Rabobank macro-economics strategist.

In fact, while some populists fade, populism itself around the world could grow and become stronger, while struggling populists turn more extreme rather than moderate to seek popularity.

Just because the current generation of populists may not (remain in control of their countries), I dont think it means were going back to the middle, said Jan Lambregts of Rabobank, the global investment bank, speaking at the virtual Canadian Crops Convention.

I think it means people are still unhappy, theyre willing to roll the dice even more and get people in more radical ideas, to try them out. What could possibly go wrong if youre already losing?

Populist politics have roared into trade politics in recent years, upending many assumptions about how global trade would develop in the 2020s.

Instead of a general support for free markets and ever-greater globalization of production and trade, many countries have seen protectionism thrown up to block imports of foreign products and domestic controls to protect domestic food production.

The onset of COVID-19 has accelerated and exacerbated the trend, with fights over vaccine supply and control being widespread.

Whereas we previously thought my own country first is a terrible term, this is fairly acceptable in the context of COVID, and I think in the context of food it is also something that is reasonably acceptable to say, said Lambregts, pointing to Russias export taxes on grain this year.

Thats quite an amazing change from say 10 or 15 years ago.

Dont expect to see much lessening of U.S.-China friction.

I dont think this is a Democrats versus Republicans type of story. I think both are tough on China and both try to outdo each other on that front and try to defend American interests, after a long period in which they neglected that, said Lambregts.

In general, concern over domestic food supplies is going to preoccupy many nations, especially those with insecure governments.

(Food security) is for these governments crucial. If they get food prices wrong, in many of these countries they have an immediate backlash for them. If they are seen to allow exports to occur of food that is rising too much for domestic consumption, that is devastating I think for many governments.Other macro trends Lambregts expects to see dominate the remainder of 2021 include:

Food, farming and agriculture are uniquely political areas, and that reality is showing up around the world today. Lambregts said this is highlighted by the situation in India, where the government is trying to deregulate its massive farm economy but facing relentless opposition from small farmers and opposition politicians.

I think it is indicative of how sensitive things about agriculture can be, how it affects peoples livelihood, and just how quickly this can become a national security concern when the government intervenes, said Lambregts.

See more here:

Lingering populism considered ongoing threat to trade - Western Producer

In its daily more feverish attempts to push for the re-election of the sitting American president in the summer months of 2020, the Times took to referring to the incumbent as a populist. It was a strange word to use about Donald Trump. If there is such a thing, surely a populist has to be someone who has appeal for an entire electorate. But Trump lost ground with those earning under $50,000 a year, was overwhelmingly unpopular with black voters and commanded the support of only a minority of women. The young didnt like him. Hispanics preferred Joe Biden by a margin of 30 points. How could someone who repelled such significant sections of the voting public properly be called a populist?

Not for the first time, Rupert Murdoch was squirting his own brand of perfumed aerosol. The word, surely, was authoritarian.

Behind the careless use of the word populism lies an assumption that is as ugly as it is deeply rooted. In this world-view, it is taken for granted that the people conveniently lumpen are as mean and vindictive as the journalists who evoke them. The white working class is represented as aching for the swish of the guillotine. Theyre all driving around in white vans fighting for their own survival, sending donations to Migration Watch, carousing with Tommy Robinson and nursing early medieval views on crime and punishment. (None of them, naturally, works in hospitals, schools, care homes or any other essential service. None of them selflessly maintains the social fabric.) Only through the machinations of a liberal elite, it is implied, are these people denied what they truly want: for immigrants to die in the sea and for Western civilisation to purify itself of everything and everyone who contaminates it from outside.

The obvious trick behind this kind of polemic is to pretend that its the people who are the agents of reaction and that, in a burst of disruptive energy, their thwarted desires are finally being acknowledged by fresh-faced outsiders who have arrived in decadent capital cities like Washington, DC, London, Budapest, Brasilia and Warsaw to outrage and defy the political establishment.

In 2020, the one-time conservative Anne Applebaum published a beautifully written and important book, Twilight of Democracy, to kill this ridiculous narrative. She wrote of how many friends she had lost by refusing to surrender to the fashionable trend of pretending to be hard done by when youre on top. But she went on to ask the far more important question arising: why is the right wing, in Europe, in the UK, in India and in the US, moving so much further to the right?

Applebaum had lived in eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, so she brought an interesting perspective. She knew a little bit about collaboration by intellectuals inside corrupt regimes. She was horrified to see something of the same mentality developing in the West. Why were so many writers, editors and politicians prepared to collude with known liars? Why had they abandoned their faith in reason and democracy, in order to offer unquestioning support to leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Viktor Orbn, whom they knew to have a long record of rarely telling the truth? Why did they no longer trust that their own point of view might prevail through argument? Why were they frightened to disown malpractice on their own side? And why were they closing their eyes to the behaviour of leaders who were more suited to crashing round in the china shop than they were to restocking it?

Why, in other words, had the right abandoned its values?

While living in Poland in the 1980s, Applebaum had admired fellow anti-communists. She had seen Conservatism in the UK and Republicanism in the US as philosophies that brought freedom. But now, in the 21st century, she could not understand the turn they had taken into what she felt to be despair. She had lost her affinity with a ruling class which had given up. She knew from first-hand experience that the responsibility for the impending chaos of Brexit, and all the nostalgia it was engendering, did not lie with an abandoned section of the electorate who were said to know no better. She could see that the white working class was being paraded as disingenuous cover for where the real responsibility lay: among the very people who had once been her colleagues.

It did not need Applebaum to point out that the people who were desperate to pull Britain away from its geographical moorings were as likely to be found in Knightsbridge as in Hartlepool. The leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, who put the fear of God into the Conservative Party, was a stockbroker. His principal cheerleaders were press owners, paid-up members of an elite who all lived abroad: Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers.

The Conservative benches were well stocked with entitled parliamentary opportunists who were well placed to survive turbulence. Their representative and, later, leader, was an Old Etonian, Boris Johnson. Just a handful of years earlier, before he morphed into yet another populist who mislaid his popularity, Johnson had been cheerfully pro-EU.

You may want to argue that so-called popular movements have always been led by characters from smart backgrounds. The British fascist leader of the 1930s, Oswald Mosley (Roderick Spode in PG Wodehouses comic fiction), was a product of Winchester and Sandhurst, and newsreel footage shows him speaking to his ranks of anti-Semitic thugs in tones which sound absurdly posh to modern ears. Donald Trump, the great disrupter in the US, inherited a fortune from his father, which, by some calculations, would today be far greater if he had simply left it in the bank.

But, even by historic standards, the Brexit movement does seem peculiarly lordly, depending on a generation of privileged journalists, politicians and financiers who wanted to kick away the European ladder on which they themselves had climbed. A bunch of Etonian politicians had benefited personally from social advances achieved by the liberal left. Not for them the untrendy prejudices of Section 28! But never once did they stop to acknowledge that it was their opponents who had secured them their new freedoms of lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Trumps parallel electoral tactic in the United States was to dispel the notion of shame. That ambition defined his project and was at the heart of his huge and stubborn appeal. Trump promised to take the embarrassment out of peoples own worst feelings. And by people he didnt just mean the working class. Far from it. The well-to-do were to be given a free pass as well.

Before Trump, the common pieties of public life had meant that any elector who had sexist or racist feelings, or who wanted always to insist on their own needs over the needs of others, might have felt vaguely rebuked by notions of good and bad. A scent of disapproval would have reached them from the religious and non-religious institutions which were there to suggest social norms. But, under Trump, all bets were off. People of all backgrounds, super-rich and dirt poor, were given permission to feel whatever they damn well pleased by a president who proclaimed, Look at me, Im never ashamed. Im never contrite. Why should you be?

[See also:The politics of the cattle market: why Italy remains ungovernable]

All revolutions, whether of the right or the left, are powered by grievance. But the important question is always whether the grievance is real or concocted. In June 1975, I voted against Britain joining the Common Market on the usual leftist grounds that it was a capitalist cartel, and therefore a conspiracy against the poor. However, as the years went by, I began to see great advantages in belonging to a grouping in which most of the population were citizens, not subjects. It made a difference to the tone of debate.

Because Britain, and England in particular, still took pride in a long-suffering culture eager to fall back on conservatism of all kinds, it was positive for us to join a club which led reluctant British governments towards a welcome emphasis on womens rights, workers rights, consumer standards, equality, freedom and the rule of law. It was refreshing for our politics to have input from foreign politicians who seemed to have a scale and a vision ours lacked. We were in a group with a number of countries that were better governed than we were, and with a more urgent and accurate sense of history. European leaders such as Angela Merkel or Franois Mitterrand seemed like large figures, not least because they saw the future and werent frightened of it.

***

Two aspects of European behaviour turned out to be attractive to any reluctant joiner like me. First, it was reassuring at a time when American foreign policy was getting daily crazier to be part, in letter if not in spirit, of an organisation which was neither craven towards, nor beholden to, the US. The EU acted as a counterbalance of sanity, particularly when, in the last century, American presidents were condoning illegality in Central America or the Middle East. During the build-up to the invasion of Iraq it was noticeable that, although the EU was not able to shake Tony Blair out of his school-prefect relationship with his headmaster, George W Bush, the sanest voices of dissent came from countries to the south of us. France, in particular, spoke nothing but sense.

If, as we believe, up to a million Iraqis may since have been killed by the consequences of the Anglo-American intervention, it ought to have been possible for us to be able to look across gratefully to well-meaning allies who were innocent of the damage and smart enough to foresee it. But rather than thanking them for warning against our foolishness, it is as if we are, through Brexit, intent on punishing our friends for being right.

The second unifying factor in Europe was a belief in multiculturalism. I had been brought up in an all-white seaside town in the 1950s, so I could see no downside to the tremendous vitality brought to large cities by immigration, at first from the West Indies, later from Africa. New arrivals cheered the country up, and did a lot to make it less smug and introspective. Later, when waves of refugees took to small boats in the Mediterranean, it was the Greeks, the Italians and the Germans who behaved heroically, doing their best by people whose only crime was to be born in places torn apart by invasion or by civil war.

But, to our shame in the UK, it had in the interval become necessary to the overriding Brexit cause to insist, against all evidence, that multiculturalism had failed and that taking back control must mean the same thing as closing down our borders. (This in spite of the fact that we were told at the same time that we needed to be part of something called the free market.)

Any Briton who has lived through the four years following the Brexit referendum and watched executive power being used to bypass parliament and yielded without conscience to unelected advisers in Downing Street will know just how hollow the promise to take back control has turned out to be. Was there no reason for it but spite?

When I was young, there was a very funny column under the pseudonym of Peter Simple. It was whimsical regressive fantasy in the old Daily Telegraph, full of attacks on motoring and housing estates. Peter Simple extolled an England peopled by sheep, aristocracy and peasants, and unspoilt by psychology, materialism or the weakening of the class system. When he railed against psychoanalysts in Hampstead, the dog whistle was at full screech. But in an interview with the columns author, Michael Wharton, in the 1970s, he complained bitterly that, since his days at Oxford, it had always been assumed that such feudal attitudes must be a form of camp. It was amusing, of course, to want to take Britain back to the 18th century. It made good copy. But surely he couldnt possibly have meant it?

Something of the same disbelief arises when we look with any serious attention at the arguments of populists all over the world, who are as outraged as Peter Simple that onlookers think theyre kidding. Is there a single person in the UK who today believes our country will be more prosperous outside the EU? Is there anyone in the US who believes that the building of a wall on the southern border will stop illegal immigration? Is there a single person in Brazil who thinks that its wise to take no account either of science or medicine when dealing with a lethal pandemic? Does any woman believe Andrzej Duda in Poland is banning abortion for anything but the most cynical of electoral reasons? And is there anyone in India who doesnt know that Narendra Modis citizenship law was anti-Muslim in intention and racist in execution?

***

Applebaum believes that Western countries are pulling out of democracy in a kind of intellectual funk, but surely these examples suggest that what were pulling out of is modernity. Anyone with half a brain can see that in the 21st century the most urgent and profound question will be how the seven billion people in the world who are poor will be able to share a degree of opportunity with the billion who are rich. Boris Johnsons response is to put his head down and write books about Winston Churchill.

Again, one of the bleakest features of my adolescence in the 1960s was the ridiculous disparity between Britains claims to global status and the reality of its condition. Harold Macmillan was rash enough to say that Britain was in an alliance with the US which resembled that of the Greeks with the Romans. Wed do the thinking, theyd do the enforcing. It became clear at the time that even if you could dismantle at least some parts of an empire at unexpected speed, dismantling the imperial thinking that went with it was going to take much longer.

In the 20th century, British institutions continued to behave as if they were powerful and unique long after they had ceased to be either. I had never thought that in the 21st century such grandiosity and stupidity would return. I thought the empire was dead. But the rhetoricians of Brexit chose, not purely for tactical reasons but because some of them actually believed it, to revive the convenient idea of British exceptionalism. Their loathing for progress could be deodorised only if they refloated the notion that Britain was different.

Its a challenge for any disruptive movement to maintain the energy of their grievance when theyve achieved what they wanted. In 2021, this is the dilemma which faces populists all over the world. In many countries, self-styled outsiders have taken their turn at the heart of establishments from which they claimed to be excluded at which point it gets harder to go on saying that everything is rigged in a terrible conspiracy against them.

[see also:An age without qualities]

Trump, like Thatcher, passed his time as leader railing against his own administration, and even propagated the myth of a deep state which stole the election from him. But nothing could hide the fact that he had been the person in power. If he didnt like the weather, sorry, it was he who had made it. Trump was left, at the end, in the same position as Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, of deliberately inciting disorder in the form of an insurrection against the country he led and the institutions over which he governed.

In the UK, a similar loss of comforting paranoia continues to confound Brexiteers. They won. They have control. The government is led by one of their own. What happens is their fault, and nobody elses. If the United Kingdom does, as a result of Brexit, fracture either in Ireland or Scotland, if the economy falters, if the departure has already turned out more costly and disruptive than they predicted, they have no one to blame but themselves.

No wonder, therefore, that our friends, the would-be populists, are suddenly bereft. They must use all their ingenuity to summon up ever wilder grievances to power their motivating sense of injury. If overdogs are to go on pretending to be underdogs, they must dream up demands as impossibilist as possible. The first of these demands, outlined above, is suitably unlikely. Modern Britain must return to the 1950s. But the second demand is more sinister. The reason repeatedly advanced to explain the failure of the populists endeavours to deliver paradise has been that although the priorities of the government are right wing, the underlying culture still is not.

It is in this context, created by the urgent desire to shift blame, that sustained and irrational attacks on the BBC and on the universities can best be understood. When Michael Gove says he is sick of experts, what he means is that he is sick of facts. In order to represent Britain as a hell of excess tolerance, which needs shaking up and made more verbally violent, it is vital for the Brexit victors to pretend that its broadcast media are biased, its civil servants are useless, and its teaching anti-imperialist. (If they thought they could get away with it, they would throw in their contempt for the NHS: only the NHSs universal popularity during Covid leaves them grumbling behind their hands.) When writers from the Spectator form a Free Speech Union, its aim is not, as you might hope, to expand the range and quality of public expression by attacking the ruthless no-platforming of non-conformists in the Daily Mail, theDaily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the Times. Nor is its interest in addressing the covert problems of censorship caused by minorities being under-represented in the mainstream. No, its purpose is to concentrate its efforts exclusively on protecting the right to give offence.

[See also:The Covid reset]

As someone who has spent the last 50 years writing, I, too, care about giving offence. Its vital. Whether doing it intentionally or unintentionally, I could hardly have worked without it. Nor would I ever forgo the chance to write about any culture or race or class I choose, trusting that I will be held to account by the far better-informed people I write about. As Cate Blanchett said, if shes not to be allowed to act people different from herself, she doesnt want to act. But its precisely because these freedoms are so essential to me that I dont want to see them weaponised in a tedious culture war, waged for no honest reason except to divert attention from far deeper political failures.

This is at the heart of the problem for populists everywhere. They are not actually very popular any more. Yes, there are individuals within the electorate who feel fenced in by what they see as political correctness. But a far greater number of people believe that in our daily dealings with others, whatever their beliefs, we should show a degree of common courtesy, which corresponds to how we ourselves would wish to be treated. Yes, there are people in Bristol who would prefer the statues of slave-owners to be removed by the city council, and not toppled by students. But they are as nothing to the number of people in Bristol who are horrified by the slave trade in the first place. Yes, there are people in the United States who would like to see fewer immigrants from Mexico, but if the price of their exclusion is to be the separation of parents and children, they are not sure they want to pay that price. Yes, there is indeed in Britain an industrial working class that has been viciously hard done by in the shift from manufacturing and the years of public squalor and austerity. But polls show that they are already beginning to regret being talked into believing that their neglect ever had much to do with Brussels.

Applebaum believes that the answer to the question Why is the right moving so far right? is philosophical. I believe its tactical. Theres nowhere else to go. For a right wing that are failing to deliver either the freedom or the prosperity they promised, the only possible route is towards the fantasy that they are being frustrated by hostile powers stronger than them. Thats the alibi, thats the excuse. If only it were true.

David Hares new book of essays and poems We Travelled will be published by Faber & Faber in August

See the article here:

Populism without the people - New Statesman

By Neil Patel

Last week, former President George W. Bush said he's not worried about the current moment in American politics because "these populist movements begin to fritter over time." I don't know Bush well personally, but I served in his administration for eight years. As a senior staffer to Vice President Dick Cheney, I was in numerous meetings with Bush each week. While I did not agree with the president on every policy issue, I did leave my service with a feeling that, agree with him or not, Bush is a good person who cares a lot about our country.

That's why his statement is so frustrating.

The country is going through profound changes and political difficulties, to say the least. Populist sentiments started way back with the Tea Party movement on the right in 2009 and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left in 2011. You could even argue that the first signs surfaced with the Ross Perot presidential candidacy in 1992. The populist movement has been building for many years, and it shows little sign of slowing down. The majority of voters on the Republican side are Trump populists, and all the energy in current Democratic politics is with the socialist wing led by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Populism is, of course, less of a political ideology than it is a sign people are unhappy with American leadership. The approval and trust levels for elected leaders and leading institutions have been in free-fall for years. On the left and on the right, there is a growing belief that society's riches are flowing too heavily to a privileged and well-connected few and not enough to the average American. On the left, there is a strong desire to redistribute more wealth through huge tax changes. On the right, the focus is on issues such as immigration, trade and globalization.

If you are an American leader during this time of unrest, you have a couple of options to choose from. First, think deeply about why people are upset and whether our system could use any fundamental reforms. Second, if you conclude things are fine without reforms, work as hard as possible to convince people why things are OK and/or how change could make things worse. In these scenarios, the unrest we are seeing could cause Americans to come together in a constructive way. The best historic example of constructive populism may be when anti-tax populist sentiments rose in Boston in the late 1700s. Enlightened and engaged leaders were able to harness the populist energy toward positive outcomes: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the formation of the country we now love.

In the worst-case scenario, our leaders can ignore the warning signs and hope things just fritter away. That's the scenario we are in, unfortunately. Populism can definitely turn ugly. We have seen some of that already. And historically, ignoring the concerns of regular people led to almost 100 years of repressive communist rule in Russia and the development of a Nazi state in Germany that didn't end until millions were killed in a world war.

Our leaders aren't ignoring all of today's warnings because they are bad people; they do it because our society has become so segregated that people who are thriving are surrounded almost exclusively by others who are also thriving. This segregation facilitates worldviews that can grow detached from reality.

Washington's business is corporate influence, just as New York's dominant industry is finance and Los Angeles' is entertainment. Huge, multinational companies open offices in Washington with the express purpose of shaping the policy agenda. They fund the trade associations; they employ the lobby shops and public relations firms; and their advertising dollars drive the news publications that dominate our capital. An outright majority of departing members of Congress now go to work in this booming multibillion-dollar influence industry. The result is a corporate culture in Washington closely attuned to a big-business worldview, representing those who are thriving in our current system and increasingly out of touch with anything else.

Due to our extreme segregation in America, Bush and our other national leaders do not engage much on policy matters, except in highly controlled, corporate-dominated environments. The debates at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, or the once counterculture and now corporate-culture South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, do not reflect the concerns of regular Americans. These events reflect the concerns of the huge corporations that pay millions to sponsor them.

We still have an amazing country with a lot of wealth and a lot of peace by historical standards. Changes to fundamental policies such as taxes, immigration, trade or foreign policy can cause harm. But continuing to ignore the cries for change and hope the problems just fritter away is not the answer. On the contrary, such a strategy increases the chances that our current unrest leads to harmful outcomes. For our country to move in a constructive direction, our leaders need to break out of their bubbles and step up like many before them have done.

Most of our leaders care about our country. I know from years of close contact with George W. Bush that he certainly does. But these leaders are living in a world that is not reflective of America as a whole. The same voters now clamoring for change once voted for Barack Obama and George Bush. They haven't turned into bad people overnight. They just don't believe our system is really working for their interests. That concern can lead to positive reform, or it can turn really ugly. It's still up to us. Either way, this isn't likely to just fritter away.

2021, Creators

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Is populism going to fritter away over time as George W. Bush predicts? - Chicago Daily Herald

Written in the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyamas book The End of History was the most powerful political and sociological document theorising about situations at that time the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of the socialist experience, a new world order.

With a thinking based on Hegel and not excluding reminiscences of Marx, Fukuyama perhaps the most important intellectual of the last 50 years reached the conclusion that liberal democracy was translating into reality the development of the highest human values.

Today in 2021, with the coronavirus pandemic bringing every absolute idea into crisis, the political scientist sustains some essential convictions, while raising doubts over specific points.

Does it seem fair to you that your ideas are considered part of the theoretical and ideological baggage of neoliberalism?

No, I dont think thats correct but it depends on your definition of neoliberalism. I use the term neoliberal to denote a certain economic focus identified with the so-called Chicago School, highly committed ideologically to the free market and opposed to state intervention, seeking to deregulate and privatise. This is a school of thought which became generalised and was particularly influential after the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher between 1979 and 1980, underlying the politics of the Washington Consensus. I never defended that set of policies in particular. A market economy is necessary I dont think theres much alternative if you want to achieve sustained economic growth. Neoliberalism, according to my definition, is linked to a rigid ideological hostility to state action and thats something I never joined.

Does the end of history imply the end of the welfare state?

The welfare state is necessary, I never opposed it. One of the tasks ahead of us is to expand the welfare state. In the United States we still do not have anything like a government system of universal and obligatory healthcare and thats something desperately needed. You can argue about the sustainability of certain social programmes and the implications of higher tax levels for inflation, which are problems which may arise. But I believe in the idea that a modern democratic government has to provide its citizens with social protection and I dont see how anybody could be opposed to that.

In this series of interviews, many intellectuals and thinkers the anthropologist and feminist Rita Segato, the Spanish writer Arturo Prez Reverte and the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy have been using the word end, in reference to our civilisation or the Western world as we know it, all motivated by the pandemic. Is coronavirus the end of something? Do these ends represent some point of contact with your thinking?

The use of the word end in my book, The End of History, is often misunderstood its used in the sense of objective or aim. The book addresses the questions: Where is history aiming in terms of the desirable development of a modern society and what form will society finally take? It does not allude to end in the sense of any conclusion. Its not really the original Marxist or Hegelian use of the word, which is my theoretical framework.

I dont think that the current pandemic is the end of anything. Humanity has been subject to pandemics throughout its existence with humans and viruses evolving together. Weve been through many pandemics before and human beings have adapted. You can already see this current pandemic coming to an end. The long-term effects of this situation may not be so great in many aspects.

You said in an interview that in The End of History and the Last Man you were already insinuating some questions related to the eruption of Donald Trump, using some of the underlying concepts which describe the current political movements based on identity. How did you arrive at that intuition of what seems to be happening 25 years later?

What I said in the last chapters of The End of History and the Last Man is that a successful liberal democracy cannot be sustainable for various reasons. Firstly, human beings are ambitious and the opportunities offered by our democracy are often not big enough to contain their ambition. That is the context in which I was referring to a possible Donald Trump, who was fantastically ambitious as a rising real-estate entrepreneur. And the question was if he would be satisfied with that or if he would want to move onto grander things. It turns out that he was not satisfied but also had political ambitions. We are seeing the consequences of that.

Another thing I spoke about towards the end of the book is whether peace and prosperity alone would be enough to satisfy human beings or if part of their psychology aspires to something more elevated, not just material aspirations questions related to the idea of justice, to risks and dangers. One thing I said in the original draft was that if people could not fight for peace and justice, then they would fight against peace and justice because basically they would be bored. There would be the desire for more victories, for mountains to climb. In certain aspects, that describes the situation of many rich countries at the moment.

You said: Poland or Hungary moving in that direction does not surprise me but that the United States should elect somebody like Trump is something I wouldnt have predicted. What was more surprising, Trump winning or Joe Biden?

The 2016 elections surprised everybody, including Donald Trump himself. The more recent ones were not so surprising because he did not have that excellent a track record in his four years. The system corrected itself.

But the biggest problem, which is now much deeper, is that Americans live in two parallel universes of information. A significant percentage of Americans, for example, do not believe that the November 3 elections were free and fair, although they were. Thats a big problem for a democracy because if there is no agreement over such a basic fact as an election, the very idea of democracy is at stake.

That was not foreseen. Its one of the consequences of the rise of the Internet. Today we live in a media environment where the traditional sources of information are discredited. Anybody can publish whatever they like and they do. People really do not agree over the same basic facts nor how the world works.

But in February, just months before the election, nobody would have believed that Joe Biden could be president.

Im not so sure that so much anticipation is worth much. Weve seen plenty of surprises in multiple elections. In February nobody was expecting a great pandemic either. That obviously had a huge impact on the way Americans voted and how they saw politics. I cannot emphasise that fact enough.

You said: Most Republicans believe that the elections won by Joe Biden were fraudulent and this will be very noxious for democracy in the future. What will happen from here on will be difficult to forecast because it will depend on the course of the pandemic. Will Joe Biden be able to implement his platform? Whats your opinion of the idea of a green new deal?

Biden opted for a more ambitious set of initiatives than many people were expecting with his stimulus bill which has just been approved by Congress. Without even being in final form, it has been approved by both Houses of Congress. It really constitutes a great stimulus, almost US$2 trillion, far more than any contribution during the financial crisis of 2008.

Things could look very different by the end of 2021 with the pandemic largely over and people returning to restaurants, meetings and offices while schools reopen. Its highly probable that the US economy will be growing very fast and creating many jobs. That alone could affect the perception of the Joe Biden presidency. For now, of course, nobody knows if that will really happen. Many things might happen another wave of the virus or a mutation or some other interfering factor in that kind of scenario. But the possibilities clearly exist for a more positive result, as Ive just suggested.

In the 1990s many welfare state ideas were abandoned and many social democrats adopted what was called the third way. What is the political and ideological role of social democracy at present?

Some form of social democracy is needed to sustain a really democratic system. Left to themselves, market economies produce plenty of inequality. Something must be done (and by the state) to protect health and pensions. Protection against unemployment is required if not, you will have a very unstable situation politically with many people vulnerable and annoyed. A welfare state is important.

Much of what happened in the last three decades of the past century was an excessive expansion of certain social benefits. That is particularly true of Latin America, including Argentina, I think. These countries promised a high level of benefits. The question is not whether benefits ought to be granted but whether they are accessible and sustainable and whether there are sufficient fiscal revenues to maintain them. Many countries fell into overspending, accumulating too much debt. When a country occupies a relatively small part of the world economy, like Argentina, it cannot accumulate such a level of debt without very serious consequences for the exchange rate and inflation. Thats why it had to tighten its belt, as other countries also did in that period certainly in Scandinavia. Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden are famous for having very extended welfare states and all those countries in this period discovered that they had to cut their taxes and also their social benefits or otherwise to orient the latter more precisely. They had also reached a point at which they really could not keep the promises made.

That kind of adjustment is necessary. Being fiscally tidy need not imply any kind of ideological hostility towards the idea of a welfare state.

When interviewed within this same series, President Alberto Fernndez defined himself as a social democrat but he reached power via a coalition with left-wing populism, as Kirchnerism defines itself. Is coexistence possible there? Is this a new form of the third way?

In the long run a coalition between populists and social democratic politicians may well be pretty difficult. That has to do with the nature of populism. Populist leaders habitually base their appeal on personality rather than policies or broad ideology. The appeal lies in the individual, something which applied to Hugo Chvez and Juan Pern. You can see in Juan Pern and other famous populists in Argentine history and in general throughout the world that this political style does not fit very well into coalitions based on power-sharing with negotiated results. That is something which could happen in a parliamentary democracy with a multiparty coalition but thats not really the populist style. It would probably be pretty difficult to maintain that type of alliance during a prolonged period of time.

Did the handling of the health crisis in the United States surprise you? Was that an ideological response on the part of Donald Trump?

Yes, it did surprise me. I dont think that the problem was ideological. Like many of the other things he did, it was not motivated by ideas but by a very limited vision of his own personal self-interest. He did not see the pandemic as a threat to the health of the American people but as a threat to his own re-election. Everything he did was directed to assuring his re-election. Thats why he was so interested in re-opening the economy long before it was safe. He did that against the advice of the entire public health community, people who really understood the nature of these epidemics. The result was that the entire health policy was very badly administered and provoked the deaths of many more people than necessary.

There are similar criticisms of Jair Bolsonaros management of the pandemic. Many people remark on the difference with what happened under the populist rgime of Nicols Maduro and Cuban socialism. Why should a right-wing populist perform so badly and those on the left not so much, over and above the logical doubts about the data in Venezuela and Cuba?

I dont have a complete answer to that. Theres another populist who also performed very badly, namely Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador in Mexico. He had a terrible track record handling the pandemic. Even though AMLO is a left-wing populist, he has many of the same characteristics as Bolsonaro he does not believe in the health experts and tried to minimise the importance of the epidemic.

Populists want to be popular. They dont want to be the ones transmitting bad news. Its very hard for them to say things like Were all in this together. We have a very serious problem. You must stay home, use face-masks and not send the children to school. These are very unpopular things to communicate. Thats really one of the reasons why many populists ended up pushing the wrong policies to face up to the epidemic.

In your book Identity, you explain that the 1970-2005 period was witness to what Samuel Huntington called the third wave of democratisation since the number of countries who could be classified as elective democracies rose from approximately 35 to over 110. In this period, liberal democracy became the predetermined form of government for a great part of the world, at least as an aspiration, if not in practice. Could the pandemic mark the end of this process, a return to the 1980s before this process of democratisation could take wing?

Its possible that we are at a very dangerous turning-point in the struggle for global democracy. Freedom House, which issues an annual report, Freedom in the World, has noted a diminished measure of global freedom for the 15th year running with a steeper decline due to the pandemic. There are many world leaders who use the pandemic as an excuse to boost their authority Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Viktor Orbn in Hungary, etc. Pandemics are opportunities for the more authoritarian governments. Coronavirus has also checked protests against governments because people do not feel safe going out in big crowds in urban areas. Thats worrying. There has been a military coup in Myanmar, the arrest of Aleksi Navalny in Russia, the extension of the security law in Hong Kong in early 2020. Many really bad things have happened.

For sure what comes next could be different there is a lot of repressed anger over the way various authoritarian governments have managed the pandemic until now. Its possible that once things go back to being more normal, much of this anger will again manifest itself in the form of protest. Even during the pandemic we saw many protests in Sudan, Algeria, Armenia. This happened in many parts of the world where the people were highly mobilised against corrupt and/or incompetent governments. I hope that the end of the pandemic is also a turning-point and that the pressure on the people relaxes a bit, permitting a more honest expression of the opinions of the citizenry.

You said: The agenda of the 20th century is passing from being a struggle over economic issues to one more based on identity. Thats a worrying movement in which politicians use their democratic legitimacy to attack the liberal parts of the system such as the Constitution and the institutions. In an interview, the Spanish deputy [of Argentine origin] Cayetana lvarez de Toledo said that the struggle against the identity movement is part of a cultural battle against the moral superiority of the left. Is the identity agenda left-wing or ideological?

There are dangerous identity movements both on the left and on the right. Your quote complains about progressive or leftist identity movements in the United States, feminism, racial justice or LGBT rights, leading to the phenomenon of political correctness and the cancellation culture. People have used the power of the Internet to silence people they dont like.

But there is also a right-wing form of identity politics represented by Donald Trump. Its not an economic problem thats being pushed, its a certain kind of social conservative identity which makes people loyal to him and the current Republican Party. The Republican Party used to be a party backing low taxes, de-regulation and other economic policy issues. Now its become a party based more on the traditional US identity. Identity is something which can be used and abused by both sides of the political spectrum.

Can the individual psychology of politicians, their narcissistic traits, be a problem for democracy?

One of the things which we are currently learning is that people are not rational in the traditional sense. Economists in particular think that people are rational in the sense that they have preferences, observe the world and draw conclusions as to how it works before proceeding to act on the basis of elaborated theories. But the action commences with their preferences as to what they want to happen. They do not try to find out how the world works but how they can manipulate things to produce the results they want. That leads to a lack of reality which affects politics in its essence.

Just to show one concrete case of this, many Republicans wanted Donald Trump to win, something which did not happen. There is plenty of credible evidence that he lost the election in key states. But their desire to see him win was so powerful that they were ready to take any fragment of evidence as the truth, regardless of how little credibility it had. Thats testimony to how people in reality are not so rational about politics or other issues in which they are emotionally involved with the result.

In Argentina, Cambiemos, the political force headed by Mauricio Macri, came to power defending the free market and globalisation. Many people thought he would be the slayer of populism. Nevertheless, in the short time he was in power inflation and, above all, poverty grew and Kirchnerism won again in the next elections. Why does liberalism sometimes not deliver popular welfare?

I really dont have a good answer for that. The right policies for Argentina to follow in that period occurred in a pretty complex reality and probably should not have been determined by too ideological a vision, whether populist or free market. But honestly, I do not know enough about the specific decisions taken to explain the failure or why things unfolded the way they did.

You said: Latin American populism has been very negative. Populists believe that they are the incarnation of the direct representation of the people. They dont want other institutions, such as the courts or the media, to be obstacles to their direct power, which is why they do everything possible to undermine those institutions when they do not serve their interests, as happened in Argentina with the Indec statistics bureau concealing the high inflation at that time. Do you see similarities between the Kirchner couple and Donald Trump?

There are many similarities. As president, Trump attacked any institution which did not support him the FBI, the intelligence community, the Justice Department and even the Weather Bureau, the latter because they did not back his forecast that there would be a hurricane in Alabama. There is a great degree of similarity between that and Kirchnerism.

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Fukuyama: Theres similarities between populism of Trump and Kirchnerism - Buenos Aires Times

Angela Merkel likes to say there is no alternative to her policies; and when she does make U-turns, she tends not to admit to them. So it was highly unusual when last week, amid growing anger about her governments response to the pandemic, the chancellor apologised to the German people. The government had planned to put the country in a tight lockdown for five days over Easter in an attempt to curb the sharp rise in infections, but abandoned the idea after it was widely criticised.

In the early phase of the pandemic, Germany seemed to stand out as one of the few western democracies that had handled it relatively successfully. A chorus of commentators attributed this to Merkel herself and in particular to her technocratic approach, based on her background as a scientist. By contrast, they saw other countries such as the UK and the US, where populist leaders were in power, as mishandling the crisis.

Now, however, the roles have been reversed. Of course, the pandemic is far from over and things could change again for example, if, as expected, vaccine rollout slows in the UK as it accelerates sharply in the EU. But for the moment, as Germany struggles with a third wave with only 14% of its citizens vaccinated, it is the UK that is seen as the success story. Earlier this month, the editor of the German tabloid Bild even ran a front page that told Brits: We envy you!

The current moment is the latest episode in an ongoing struggle between technocracy and populism in Europe. For the past decade, Europe has been engulfed by what has frequently but misleadingly been called a populist wave. But the rise of populism can itself be understood as a response to the expansion of depoliticised decision making, in particular within the EU, the ultimate model of technocratic governance. Thus, there is a kind of dialectical relationship between technocracy and populism: technocracy creates populism, which in turn leads to more technocracy in response, and so on.

A year ago, the pandemic created what might be called a technocratic moment. Suddenly, it seemed as if life and death depended on competence and expertise and many pro-Europeans hoped this had discredited populism once and for all. For example, the EUs foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, wrote last April that the pandemic brings expertise and knowledge into sharp focus principles that the populists mock or reject as they associate all of those qualities with the elite. Thus, it was an opportunity to double down on technocracy.

During the first phase of the pandemic, the EU seemed to be strengthened. But now things look different. The economic and institutional problems around the euro had already damaged the EUs reputation for competence during the past decade. Now the vaccine fiasco has undermined the perception that it is efficient in an even more dramatic way. The economist Paul Krugman wrote that the EU had demonstrated the same bureaucratic and intellectual rigidity that made the euro crisis a decade ago far worse than it should have been.

This is particularly damaging for the EU because of its long reliance on what political scientists call output legitimacy (that is, the legitimacy that comes from producing results) as a substitute for input legitimacy (that is, democracy). The damage to its reputation for competence further highlights its democratic deficit. At the same time, a much-vaunted Conference on the Future of Europe, which was originally meant to include citizens and find ways to democratise the EU, has degenerated into a power struggle between the existing institutions.

What all this means for the future of the EU is not yet clear. In Germany during the last month or so, there has been a wave of criticism of the EU and in particular the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, though the target of the criticism seems increasingly to be Berlin rather than Brussels. But even as Merkels Christian Democrats have plummeted in the polls and performed disastrously in two regional elections last weekend, this has not benefited the far-right Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD), which was formed in 2013 in response to Merkels politics of no alternatives.

Meanwhile, in a general election in the Netherlands 10 days ago, the centre-right prime minister, Mark Rutte, won a fourth consecutive term despite the fact that the country has been even slower than Germany to vaccinate its citizens. The big winner in the election was the liberal pro-European D66 party. But Thierry Baudets far-right Forum for Democracy also did well, increasing its seats in the Dutch parliament from two to eight, in part through its opposition to lockdown measures.

In Italy, the pandemic seems, if anything, to have increased rather than decreased support for the EU. Initially, there was a surge of Euroscepticism as Italy was hit hard by Covid-19 and received little support from the EU. But Italians welcomed the suspension of the EUs fiscal rules, which limit government deficits and debt and have been at the centre of disputes within the eurozone. The creation of a 750bn (645bn) EU recovery fund the NextGenerationEU restored the hope of many Italians in the union. Its recent threat to restrict the export of vaccines to countries such as the UK also seems to have gone down well.

However, the far-right Lega remains the most popular party in Italy, even if for the moment it has moderated its Euroscepticism as it backs the new government of the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, an interesting fusion of technocracy and populism. Meanwhile, according to some polls, another far-right party, Giorgia Melonis Brothers of Italy, is now the second most popular party after the Lega and could become even stronger as it opposes the Draghi government.

The next phase of the pandemic could further boost populism and reopen the conflicts within the EU that have emerged during the last decade since the euro crisis began. Europeans are starting to discuss how and when to return to the EUs fiscal rules or, in EU jargon, how to deactivate the escape clause. The current ECB president, Christine Lagarde, said recently that she hoped the rules would be revisited and improved, but the question of how exactly to do that sets fiscally hawkish countries such as Germany and the Netherlands against countries such as Italy that want more flexibility.

The politics of the recovery fund, which was meant to restore cohesion within the EU, could also be toxic. EU member states have to submit national spending plans for approval to the European commission. It was this question of how to spend EU money that led to the collapse of the previous Italian government, a coalition including the populist Five Star Movement and the centre-left Democratic party, in January. Meanwhile, on Friday, the German constitutional court blocked the German president from ratifying the fund after Bernd Lucke, the founder of the AfD, challenged its legality.

When the recovery fund was created last summer, pro-Europeans saw it as a breakthrough in European integration, hence its hubristic name. They saw it as a step towards debt mutualisation in the eurozone, or even, as the German finance minister, Olaf Scholz, put it, a Hamiltonian moment that would inexorably lead towards the creation of a fiscal and political union such as the US. But this is what the German constitutional court opposes, as it has made clear in a series of rulings in the last decade.

Economists, on the other hand, are generally sceptical about the fund, which they see as inadequate in macroeconomic terms, particularly when compared with the $1.9tn fiscal stimulus that the US Congress has recently passed. Yet though it may not be big enough to produce a real recovery, the fund is big enough to create conflicts between member states over how to spend it and to galvanise Eurosceptic parties in both the north and south of Europe. In short, the pandemic is unlikely to end the populist wave, as many centrists hoped last year.

Hans Kundnani is a senior research fellow at Chatham House and the author of The Paradox of German Power

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Europe's technocrats play into populist hands with their bungled Covid response - The Guardian