Category Archives: Populism

None of this is new. What stands out as a true departure is Mr. DeSantiss willingness to use government power in the culture war.

Sometimes this has involved areas, like public education, where the government has every right to set the rules. One such example is the Dont Say Gay bill, more properly known as the Parental Rights in Education bill, which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Another is the Individual Freedom bill, which, among other things, prohibits promotion of the concept that a person must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.

Other times, Florida has pursued a laudable goal in a dubious manner. Its Big Tech bill seeks to keep social media companies from removing political candidates and other users from their platforms, but it has serious First Amendment conflicts and has been enjoined by a federal judge.

Then theres the fight with Disney. The revocation of its special tax status is a frankly retaliatory act that also presents free-speech issues and could prove a legal and policy morass. That said, Disney got a truly extraordinary deal from the state that allowed it, in effect, to run its own city. The company never would have been granted this arrangement 55 years ago if its executives had told the states leaders, And, by the way, eventually, the Walt Disney Company will adopt cutting edge left-wing causes as its own.

The broader point of making an example of Disney is to send a message to other corporations that there could be downsides to letting themselves be pushed by progressive employees into making their institutions weapons in the culture wars, so that they conclude its best to stick to flying planes, selling soda, and so on.

How can a limited-government Tea Party Republican like Mr. DeSantis have become comfortable with this use of government? For that matter, how is it that so many Tea Party types moved so easily toward Trumpist populism?

The key, I think, is that for many people on the right, a libertarian-oriented politics was largely a way to register opposition to the mandarins who have an outsized influence on our public life. And it turns out that populism is an even more pungent way to register this opposition. Progressive domination of elite culture has now grown to include formerly neutral institutions like corporations and sports leagues. More conservatives are beginning to believe that the only countervailing institutional force is democratic political power as reflected in governors mansions, state legislatures and likely beginning next year Congress.

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Opinion | Why Ron DeSantis Is the New Republican Party - The New York Times

At the height of their power, four brothers from Sri Lankas Rajapaksa dynasty held the presidency and theprime ministers officeas well as the finance, interior and defence portfolios, among others. But just when the Rajapaksa clan seemed invincible, an economic crisis of their own making led to their undoing. But does that spell the end of South Asias most powerful political family?

On August 12, 2020, an extraordinary display of family power was under way atthe Temple of the Sacred Tooth, one of the most sacred Buddhist sites in Sri Lanka, in the central city of Kandy, the political capital of ancient kings in the island nation.

Following a landslide victory in August elections, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa swore in a cabinet that included two of his brothers and two nephews, sharing multiple portfolios among the family.

The Rajapaksas have a tradition of temple swearing-in ceremonies, a symbolism-heavy acknowledgment of the Sinhala Buddhist populism that kept propelling them into power. Over the past few years, as the familys political fortunes enlarged, the investiture entourage of officials, diplomats and media teams dutifully trekked to sacred temples on historic sites, where yet another Rajapaksa was granted yet another portfolio.

The concentration of power and mismanagement though, have been unholy.

At the inauguration of the new cabinet, the president took on the defence portfolio, contravening a constitutional amendment barring the countrys head of state from holding a cabinet post.

His powerful brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, became Sri Lankas new prime minister and was also named head of three ministries: finance, urban development and Buddhist affairs.

The president then swore in his eldest brother, Chamal Rajapaksa, as minister for irrigation, internal security, home affairs and disaster management. Chamals sonSashindra was made junior minister for high-tech agriculture. The prime ministers sonNamal became minister of youth and sports.

Barely a year later, Basil Rajapaksa was named finance minister, taking over the important portfolio from his brother, the prime minister.

At the height of their power, the Rajapaksas appeared invincible as they signed mega infrastructure contracts andamassed fortunes whilecracking down on minorities and journalists and successfully evaded accountability in a state where they held all the reins.

For several years, human rights defenders condemned the reprisals, massacres, crackdowns, corruption and cronyism of South Asias most powerful political dynasty. Their calls went unheeded by an electorate willing to overlook assaults on liberties and persuaded by the cult of strong leaders preferring action over compromise.

But that was before the island nation descended into its worst economic crisis since its independence from Britain in 1948. As an acute foreign currency crisis sparked fuel shortages, power cuts and spiraling inflation, the tide finally began to turn against the Rajapaksa clan as Sri Lankans struggled to cope with a disaster of their elected governments own making.

This week, as peaceful anti-government protests turned violent, symbols of the Rajapaksa family power came under attack in scenes unimaginable two years ago.

On Monday night, crowds stormed the prime ministers official Temple Trees residence in Colombo, forcing the army to conduct a predawn operation to rescue Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family. The prime minister by then had already submitted his resignation letter to his younger brother, the president, clearing the way for a new unity government.

Meanwhile in the southern province of Hambantota, mobs attacked the Rajapaksa Museum in the familys ancestral village of Medamulana. Two wax statues of the Rajapaksa parents were flattened and mobs trashed the building as well as the ancestral Rajapaksa home nearby.

It was a violent assault on a clan that has held feudal power since colonial times and has used patronage and privilege to rise from local to national power, placing family members in strategic positions along the way.

The Rajapaksas are a rural land-owning family from southern Sri Lanka whose ancestors have represented their native Hambantota on state and regional councils since pre-independence days.

Prominent families have always played an important role in Sri Lankan politics. But the Rajapaksas were not part of the urban political elites in the decades following independence. While families such as the Bandaranaikes which produced three Sri Lankan prime ministers and one president dominated the national scene, the Rajapaksas were part of the rural elites in the countrys Sinhalese Buddhist southern heartland.

The current presidents father, D. A. Rajapaksa, was a parliamentarian representing Hambantota district. But it was his second son, Mahinda, who catapulted the clan into national dominance when he rose from opposition leader in parliament to prime minister in 2004.

A year later, Mahinda won the 2005 presidential poll with a narrow margin, aided, according to his opponents, by a call for anelection boycott by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), a militant group better known as the Tamil Tigers.

It was Mahindas first win in the bloody fight against the Tamil Tigers based in Sri Lankas neglected north, home to the countrys Tamil minority.

As president, Mahinda initiated a pattern of leadership that would serve his familys political fortunes, earning him the moniker of clan leader of the rising Rajapaksas.

The transition from a rules-based order to one of family networks began shortly after the 2005 presidential inauguration when, according to family lore, Mahinda emerged from the investiture room and spotted his younger brother, Gotabaya.

A former army officer, Gotabaya had moved to the US only to return home ahead of the 2005 to work on his brothers election campaign.

According to biographers, the new president tapped Gotabayas shoulder and told his brother who had left the army as a lieutenant colonel that he was going to be Sri Lankas new defence secretary.

The Rajapaksas consolidation with the military had begun. It wasnt long before Mahinda was ready to unleash a war that would end the Tamil Tigers, as he promised his electorate.

By the time Mahinda was elected president, the Tamil Tigers had dropped their demands for an independent state in the north and were asking for greater autonomy under the terms of a Norway-sponsored ceasefire.

The agreement, it was hoped, would usher in a peace deal that would end a brutal civil war that had killed tens of thousands of people over two decades.

The Rajapaksa brothers instead oversaw a military operation that would defeat the Tamil Tigers, earning the support of Sri Lankans eager to end the civil war. But for the countrys Tamil minority, it unleashed a period of state violence against civilians that drew condemnations from the UN and international human rights groups over the abductions and disappearances of suspected Tamil Tiger supporters as well as journalists, activists, and others deemed to be political opponents by armed men operating in white vans, which became a symbol of political terror.

Gotabaya was particularly implicated in the infamous 2009 White Flag Incident when Tamil Tiger members and their families, after contacting the UN, Red Cross and other Western governments, agreed to surrender to Sri Lankan authorities only to be gunned down by the army.

The Rajapaksa brothers have repeatedly denied responsibility for the disappearances. They also maintain that they did not give the shoot-to-kill order during the White Flag surrender.

Gotabayas tough on security position boosted his popularity in the 2019 presidential polls justas it helped his politically more experienced brother, Mahinda, win parliamentary elections the next year.

But it was economics, not security, that proved to be the Rajapaksa clans undoing.

Horrified by the gross human rights violations in Sri Lanka, Western governments began dropping Sri Lanka fromaid disbursement lists. With aid and concessionary borrowing avenues drying up as Sri Lanka upgraded to lower-middle-income status, the government began relying heavily on commercial borrowings to finance the national budget.

The Rajapaksas were also increasing their reliance on Chinese investment. A massive port project in the familys native Hambantota soon emerged as a textbook example of the Chinese debt trap, with Sri Lanka borrowing from Chinese banks to pay for commercially unviable projects at onerous rates.

Chinese investments in a number of unfeasible mega projects, mostly in Hambantota, are the subject of numerous economic reports,with analysts apportioning blame to different parties. But in the real world, there was no doubtthat life was getting increasingly difficult for Sri Lankan citizens.

As the countrys sovereign debt ballooned, the Rajapaksas resisted national and international calls for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreement and debt restructuring, insisting that Sri Lanka would service its debt.

Meanwhile, Basil Rajapaksa, who was made finance minister in 2020 despite the corruption cases against him, was dubbed Mr. Ten Percent as allegations circulated that the family was siphoning off state funds.

His nephew, Chamal Rajapaksas sonSashindra, was involved in a disastrous ban on chemical fertiliser imports, which hit the countrys critical agricultural sector.

As the pandemic shut down tourism, Sri Lankans began to despair of their countrys ruling clan.

On May 9, when Rajapaksa supporters attacked peaceful protesters assembled in Colombo, the floodgates of rage against the powerful political dynasty opened.

A day after the deadly violence, Mahindas sonNamal, who was sports minister before his resignation earlier this year, insisted the family was merely going through a "bad patch".

At 36, Namal is widely seen as the primary Rajapaksa successor, and he has a vested interest indownplaying the troubles the family is facing.

But analysts familiar with Sri Lankas culture of dynastic patronage are not yet willing to write off the Rajapaksas as a political force. "The Rajapaksa brand still has support amongst the Sinhalese population," Akhil Bery from the Asia Society Policy Institute told AFP.

"Though much of the blame can be placed on the Rajapaksas now, their successors will inherit the mess, leaving space for the Rajapaksas to remain politically relevant."

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The rise and fall of a political dynasty that brought Sri Lanka to its knees - FRANCE 24 English

When school choice policy began making headway in the late 1990s, it came with a "voucher program" descriptor, as if a child possessed a golden ticket to visit Willy Wonka's chocolate factory but would instead use it to attend a private or parochial school.

Critics (primarily Democrats and their political benefactors, teachers unions) would harshly criticize the programs, calling them an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state or claiming it was a vehicle for Christian schools to "indoctrinate" young children.

It was one example of how Democrats used the culture wars to fuel their victories. Democrats and their political operatives were masters at attacking Republican motives and always keeping them on the defensive. When Republicans won control of Congress in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, their first budget included a proposal to consolidate various federal school lunch programs to reduce bureaucracy and overlap. Democrats called it "mean-spirited" and said Republicans "wanted" school children to "go hungry." It was all baloney. Still, it was effective, and it's all that mattered. Democrats played the part of the victim very well and used the politics of resentment to their advantage.

Over the past two decades, the fault lines have shifted. Democrats were once seen as the party of blue-collar, non-college-educated voters, while Republicans were seen as the party of the wealthy and the bourgeoisie. While those with higher incomes still generally vote Republican, the educational shift is where the stark change took place.

In 1996, Sen. Bob Dole beat President Bill Clinton among college graduates 46% to 44%. Among those who didn't attend college? Clinton won 51% to Dole's 37%. In 2020, Joe Biden received 55% of the vote among college graduates as opposed to President Donald Trump's 43%. Trump won non-college graduates 50% to Biden's 48%. But among those who never attended college? Trump won 54% to Biden's 46%.

It explains the hold populism currently has over the Republican Party. Whether it's economics, culture, or foreign policy, the Overton window within the GOP and a significant base of its voters shifted. What bothers Democrats and their allies in the press is not so much that Republicans are doing it but that they've become successful at it. It's similar to gerrymandering. It was never a "threat to democracy" until Republicans started doing it effectively.

People have recoiled at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for going after Disney for getting involved in the fight over the Parental Rights in Education bill after succumbing to pressure from some employees and LGBT advocates. But again, singling out corporations or specific industries is a tried and true Democratic tactic. "Windfall profit taxes," threatening to penalize companies financially that don't pay employees at least $15 an hour, threats of Federal Trade Commission investigations, and using environmental, social, and governance scores to force corporations into adhering to preferred Democratic climate policies are examples.

I mentioned it on Twitter and had several people offering up the "That's different!" excuse based on why Democrats did it vs. DeSantis. You see, Democratic motives for doing so are valid, while Republican motives are not. It's typical of the mindset that tries to reason, "It is awesome when our side does it."

Personally, I am not a fan of such tactics. As one who still adheres to conservatism's embrace of the three-legged stool (a robust national defense, free-market economics, and social values) variety, I am not happy with the GOP's populist shift. I think it values short-term success to the detriment of success in the long term. Still, I certainly understand why it's happening.

With a more polarized electorate, it becomes that much more critical for politicians to turn out base voters, particularly those who want to see their political leaders "fight" for whatever they think is worth the fight. Ironically, the liberal Left and nationalist Right have aligned on various economic issues as both bases have played to their more populist elements.

Republicans have found a way to reach what was always a core Democratic constituency. By aligning themselves with working-class voters, the GOP turned Ohio into a bright-red state, making Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota more competitive than they've been in decades. To the Democrats complaining about Republican tactics: The reality is, just like in that old Partnership For a Drug-Free America public service announcement from the 1980s, they learned it from watching you.

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Republicans learned some of their political tactics from watching Democrats - Washington Examiner

ByJavad Heiran-Nia

Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sets the overall direction of the country, so understanding the psychological milieu of the leader and the political establishment is important in interpreting and anticipating Irans foreign policy.

Khamenei was considered a pragmatist before he became leader in 1989, according to a CIA report published in 1986. However, in office, he took the views of radical Iranian leftists, adopting extremist slogans against the west and the United States. Khamenei, who was from the right-wing, abandoned pragmatism in foreign policy to weaken left-wing rivals and get the support of Irans security establishmentparticularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)after being appointed leader of Iran in June 1989. In going along with the hardcore faction of power, he consolidated his position.

His view of the international order is based on three axes of global power. The firstthe liberal order based on institutions and laws created after World War IIis weakening in his view because American hegemony is declining. A second axis, formed by Russia and China, is seen as rising. The third axis joins Iran with this rising new world order with Moscow and Beijing, adopting a policy of look to the East, and abandoning the old slogan of Neither East, nor West that was dominant after the 1979 revolution.

On April 26, in a meeting with students, Khamenei said: Today, the world is on the threshold of a new international order, which, after the era of bipolar world order and the theory of unipolar world order, is taking shape. In [the] current period, of course, the US has become weaker day by day.

Referring to American theorists such as Stephen Walt, who also see the decline of US primacy, Khamenei said in 2019: Some American experts and thinkers have used the term termite-like decline in describing the political, social, and economic situation of this country.

The US economy now accounts for less than a quarter of world GDP, down from a 40 percent share in 1960. US military spending is still huge, accounting for almost 40 percent of the worlds total military spending in 2020, but the US is no longer seen as the sole global hegemon.

American thinkers such as Joseph Nye see a decline of the liberal order as countries such as China exploit their membership in the World Trade Organization. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this order was challenged by the rise of China and populism in Western democracies. Once champions of globalization, the US and Europe are now seeking to counter this trend.

Although the US has long commanded the technological cutting edge, China is mounting a credible challenge in key areas, according to Nye. But, ultimately, the balance of power will be decided not by technological development but by diplomacy and strategic choices, both at home and abroad.

Foad Izadi, a well-known Iranian theorist and professor at Tehran University, shares the view that the US is declining due to structural weaknesses in its economic foundations. As Americas pillars and foundations become weaker, so does the strength of these pillars.

Izadi also said recently: We are witnessing the decline of the United States in various areas, including social and economic. This situation is not reversible and unstoppable. Many of the worlds problems will be solved with the decline of the United States.

Despite Russias poor military performance in Ukraine and the at least temporary reinvigoration of NATO, Iranian officials still assert that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a sign of the US losing strength. This was echoed by Khamenei recently on April 26, when he said, The issues of the recent war in Ukraine should be seen more deeply and in the context of the formation of a new world order.

The Iranian establishment also believes that there has been a decline in the liberal order amid a rise of populism and far-right currents in Western democracies.

The establishment uses these views to justify closer relations with Russia and China to a skeptical population, especially after intensifying criticism of the twenty-five-year agreement with China and twenty-year agreement with Russia (which hasnt been finalized).

Critics note that while Chinas rise has been substantial, its power in the future shouldnt be exaggerated. The US will remain strong for the foreseeable future, with the worlds second-largest and most dynamic and networked economy, even if Chinas GDP becomes larger.

It should be noted that the continuation of high economic growth and taking steps in the field of political development without basic fiscal, financial, and other market reforms isnt possible. As Rhodium Groups Daniel H. Rosen notes in Foreign Affairs, China is relatively poor. Per capita income in China is about one-fifth of that in the United States, at around $12,000 a year. Nine hundred million Chinese citizens are not yet living comfortable urban lives and are waiting for their turn. The problems of 2022, which will be an economically bad year for China, are expected to cast a shadow over the countrys economy for many years to come.

Regarding the second axisnamely, a future world system based on Russia and China as new polesthis approach reflects the Islamic idealist and leftist nature of the 1979 Iran revolution.

At the beginning of the revolution, the new regime sought to disrupt the international system. But following the devastating IranIraq War of the 1980s, Iran faced limitations that jeopardized the survival of the regime and forced them to adjust to new structural constraints.

In the 1990s, the Islamic Republic sought to integrate into the international system. However, the failed efforts to de-escalate tensions with the West in the Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjaniwho pushed for a China-like modeland Mohammad Khatami administrations, as well as the Western blocs unprecedented economic pressure on Iran, led Tehran to pursue strategic cooperation with US rivals.

The recent Iran-China cooperation document and Iran-Russia agreement can be seen in this light.

Irans Look to the East policy seeks to use Russia and China to bolster Iran, especially on the nuclear issue, and to withstand Western sanctions and threats. But, in practice, Russia and China dont always support Iran in the United Nations and even showed some relative compliance with US unilateral sanctions during the Donald Trump administration.

The look to the East policy also has domestic implications, reinforcing a uniform political and social structure and leading to the erosion of the middle class.

Reformists who back a look to the West view have been largely eliminated from the Iranian political structure and it is practically impossible for them to return to power, as former Iranian President Khatami recently acknowledged.

In promoting the third axis of Iran, Russia, and China, Khamenei stresses that cooperation isnt limited to trade and economic relations and includes military ties. The recent visit of Chinas defense minister, which was depicted as an extension of the Tehran-Beijing twenty-five-year document, is significant in this regard.

Irans establishment sees the US adoption of offshore balancing and gradual withdrawal from the Middle East as the harbinger of a new order in the region that entails more and more cooperation with China.

In conclusion, there is a gap between the psychological milieu of Iranian political elites and the real-world balance of power. This may cause Iranian foreign policy to be less successful, but will strengthen conservatives in the political system and their supporters at the community level. Thus, the psychology of Irans foreign political decision-makers should be assessed from the perspective of domestic politics and the protection of the interests of the ruling elite.

Javad Heiran-Nia is director of the Persian Gulf Studies Group at the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies in Iran. Follow him on Twitter: @J_Heirannia.

Wed, Nov 24, 2021

IranSourceByJavad Heiran-Nia

Iranian experts in Tehran see the Joe Biden administration's approach toward Iran and the JCPOA in the context of his government's overall foreign policy and its desire to extricate itself from military conflicts in the Persian Gulf.

Image: Iranian women hold a picture of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian flag, during the celebration of the 43rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran February 11, 2022. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

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How Iran's interpretation of the world order affects its foreign policy - Atlantic Council

Europe should confront the growing far right movement with left wing populism, says philosopher Santiago Zabala.

The European Union came into being to maintain the neoliberal project. It hoped to create a neutral politics in Europe a politics beyond left and right, beyond socialism and conservatism that would allow the states to function no matter what.

The EU wants the continent to be governed by parties firmly in the political centre, or by big coalitions.But many Europeans, even progressive people like myself, are a little bit tired of this constant search for the big centre. Moderate governments, parties and coalitions in the centre are not taking into consideration the real needs of the people while forming their policies. Most European citizens want clear, direct policies that can solve their economic problems.

All this is creating an opportunity for the rise of extremists who can communicate a very clear political message. At the moment, the far right is taking advantage of this, but the far left is not.

Philosopher Santiago Zabala explains why Europe should confront the growing far right movement with left wing populism.

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

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The EU is to blame for the rise of the far right in Europe - Al Jazeera English

This year, the Easter weekend was marred by violent protests in many urban centers of Sweden. The unprecedented unrest continued for four nights. It was in response to planned election meetings of far-right Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, who intends to contest the parliamentary election in Sweden this autumn.

The election meetings of this Danish far-right politician, who has dual Swedish citizenship, are usually his monologues with anti-Muslim vitriols. As if the Easter weekend violent unrest was not sufficient for his political ambition, the far-right rabble-rouser had planned the burn the Holy Book in front of the only mosque in Swedens university town Uppsala on the 1st of May, which was thwarted by police.

Why does a politician repeatedly go to this extent in Sweden to express his bigotry? The simple answer is that Islamophobia has become an easy route to gaining political capital in Europe. Even in a country like Sweden, the far-right party Sweden Democrats has been the third largest political party in the Parliament since 2014.

To gain more extensive support among Swedish electorates, the Sweden Democrats party adopts a so-called zero-tolerance policy against its leaders publicly being racist; however, that principle doesnt apply to their Islamophobic rhetoric.

Increasing crime rates

The party demands that Sweden end receiving refugees. It argues that unassimilated immigrants, particularly Muslims, are the reasons for the countrys increasing crime rates, economic difficulties, and expanding cultural divide.

Sweden has been for almost a century a haven for refugees and has received a sizeable number of people fleeing war and violence from the Middle East and North Africa. A country globally famous for its exceptionalism and prized welfare system has about 800,000 Muslims. It is far from the truth that Christianity is in danger in Sweden.

The Swedish economy is robust, the employment rate is among the highest in Europe, and law and order are among the best. But, the political rhetoric of the far-right in Sweden doesnt need to rely on the facts when Islamophobia holds sway over European society.

Islamophobia in Europe is no more limited to the far-right political discourse; it has become mainstream. The traditional political elites compete to steal that recipe of electoral success from the far-right cookbook. Last month, Viktor Orban won the fourth consecutive term as Hungarys prime minister with an increased majority. His government refuses to accept Bosnia as a European Union country because it has two million Muslims.

Similarly, in the recent Presidential election in France, though the far-right candidate Le Pen lost in the second round to the incumbent, President Macrons last five years of rule dissolved the most prominent civil society organisation against Islamophobia in France.

Xenophobic nationalism

Right-wing extremism is gaining ground in a significant manner in most of Europe. Mainstream centrist parties have been unable to counter with policies or mobilisation against this xenophobic nationalism that aims to restrict immigrants rights in Europe. As the Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index shows, by 2019, almost 27 per cent of European voters have voted for a far-right party in the national elections, moving away from the traditional political parties.

These far-right political outfits are already part of more than one-third of governments in Europe. The trend has made the conventional centrist parties nervous and made them adopt and profess Islamophobic policies overtly and covertly. Thus, Islamophobia is no more an exclusive feature of far-right politics. The growing popularity of the far-right has resulted in new agenda-setting in Europe.

In the name of protecting national identity and culture, many European countries have shifted their immigration policies and are taking restrictive positions. Even the countries like Sweden and Germany have fallen into that trap. There is an increasing exclusion of minorities and immigrants from European societies, creating a form of cultural racism.

This bigotry has become the position of most political parties in many countries in Europe, reflected in their policies toward the immigration and integration of minorities. Protecting or promoting the so-called European way of life has become even the official mandate of the European Union. Migration management through militarising the border receives the highest priority in the EU budget.

In countries like Sweden, which had a terrific record of having an open-door policy toward refugees, the rise of the far-right parties has also encouraged the mainstream parties to pick up far-right talking points. Some of them openly advocate in favour of a tougher stance on migration from the Middle East and North Africa but keep the countrys door open to people fleeing from Ukraine.

While hate politics is being rapidly normalised and becoming the go-to strategy of many mainstream parties in Europe, far-right politicians like Paludan are engaged in all sorts of horrible Islamophobic antics to get noticed by the electorates.

Ashok Swain

@ashoswai

Ashok Swain is a Professor of Peace and Conflict Research, at Uppsala University, Sweden

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How the right wing makes prejudice mainstream in the West - Gulf News

By STEVE PEOPLESAP National Politics Writer

NEW YORK (AP) Donald Trump s post-presidency enters a new phase this month as voters across the U.S. begin weighing the candidates he elevated to pursue a vision of a Republican Party steeped in hard-line populism, culture wars and denial of his loss in the 2020 campaign.

The first test comes on Tuesday when voters in Ohio choose between the Trump-backed JD Vance for an open U.S. Senate seat and several other contenders who spent months clamoring for the former presidents support. In the following weeks, elections in Nebraska, Pennsylvania and North Carolina will also serve as a referendum on Trumps ability to shape the future of the GOP.

In nearly every case, Trump has endorsed only those who embrace his false claims of election fraud and excuse the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection he inspired last year.

The month of May is going to be a critical window into where we are, said Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, a Trump critic defending incumbent GOP governors in Georgia, Ohio and Idaho against Trump-backed challengers this month. Im just concerned that there are some people trying to tear the party apart or burn it down.

Few states may be a higher priority for Trump than Georgia, where early voting begins on Monday ahead of the May 24 primary. Hes taken a particularly active role in the governors race there, recruiting a former U.S. senator to take on the incumbent Republican for failing to go along with his election lie. For similar reasons, Trump is also aiming to unseat the Republican secretary of state, who he unsuccessfully pressured to overturn President Joe Bidens victory.

While the primary season will play out deep into the summer, the first batch of races could set the tone for the year. If Republican voters in the early states rally behind the Trump-backed candidates, the former presidents kingmaker status would be validated, likely enhancing his power as he considers another bid for the presidency. High-profile setbacks, however, could dent his stature and give stronger footing to those who hope to advance an alternate vision for the GOP.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz predicted a strong month of May for Trump and his allies.

The voices in Washington that want him to fade into obscurity or to be silenced are engaged in their own form of wishful thinking, Cruz said in an interview. Thats not going to happen. Nor should he.

As Republicans grapple with Trump, Democrats are confronting their own set of revealing primaries.

Candidates representing the Democrats moderate and progressive wings are yanking the party in opposing directions while offering conflicting messages about how to overcome their acute political shortcomings, Bidens weak standing chief among them. History suggests that Democrats, as the party that controls Washington, may be headed for big losses in November no matter which direction they go.

But as Democrats engage in passionate debates over policies, Republicans are waging deeply personal and expensive attacks against each other that are designed, above all, to win over Trump and his strongest supporters.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who leads the GOPs effort to retake the Senate, described the month of May as a brutal sorting period likely to be dominated by Republican infighting instead of the policy solutions or contrasts with Democrats hed like to see.

School districts cope with rise in gas prices

"The primaries too often become sort of character assassinations," Scott said in an interview. "That's what has happened."

He added, "Hopefully, people come together."

No race may be messier than the Republican primary election for Georgia's governor. Trump has spent months attacking Republican incumbents Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He blames both men for not working hard enough to overturn his narrow loss in 2020 presidential election.

The results in Georgia were certified after a trio of recounts, including one partially done by hand. They all affirmed Biden's victory.

Federal and state election officials and Trump's own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the election was tainted. The former president's allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.

Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a frequent Trump critic who is not running for reelection, described Trump's decision to back former Sen. David Perdue against Kemp an "embarrassing" waste of time that could undermine the GOP's broader goals this fall.

Duncan predicted Trump would ultimately win some races and lose others this month, but he was especially optimistic about Kemp's chances to beat back Trump's challenge.

"If a sitting governor is able to defeat that whole Donald Trump notion by a huge amount and others down the ticket I think we're gonna send a message that it's gonna take more than a Donald Trump endorsement to call yourself a Republican," he said.

For now, however, Trump is unquestionably the nation's most powerful Republican as even those who find themselves on opposite sides of the former president are careful to note their loyalty to him. Cruz, who is backing opponents of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, downplayed any disagreement with him in an interview. Cruz noted he made his picks long before Trump did.

"For the four years he was president, Donald Trump had no stronger ally in the Senate than me," Cruz said.

Six months before the general election, the Republican candidates in key primaries have already spent mountains of campaign cash attacking against each other as Democrats largely save their resources and sharpest attacks for the November.

With early voting already underway in Ohio, a half-dozen Republican candidates in the state's high-profile Senate primary and their allied outside groups have spent more than $66 million this year combined on television advertising as of last week, according to Democratic officials tracking ad spending. The vast majority of the ads were Republican-on-Republican attacks.

Mike Gibbons, a Cleveland real estate developer and investment banker, spent $15 million alone on television advertising as of last week. That includes an advertising campaign attacking Vance highlighting his past description of Trump as "an idiot."

The pro-Vance super PAC known as Protect Ohio Values, meanwhile, has spent $10 million on the primary so far, including a recent barrage of attack ads casting Cruz-backed candidate Josh Mandel as "another failed career politician squish."

On the other side, the leading Senate Democratic hopeful, Rep. Tim Ryan, has spent less than $3 million so far in positive television ads promoting his own push to protect Ohio manufacturing jobs from China.

Housing market squeezing buyers battling rising mortgage rates, closing costs

The spending disparities in high-profile Senate primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina were equally stunning.

In the Pennsylvania, where Trump-backed Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund executive David McCormick are locked in a fierce fight for the GOP nomination, the candidates and allied outside groups have spent more than $48 million on television advertising so far. Democrats spent just over $10 million.

And in North Carolina, Republican forces have spent more than $15 million on a divisive primary pitting Trump-backed Rep. Ted Budd against former Gov. Pat McCrory. Democrats, who have united behind former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, spent just over $2 million.

Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, who leads the effort for Democrats to keep the Senate majority, said Republicans are essentially creating the Democrats' general election ads for them. He described the intensity of the Republican infighting in several states as "toxic for the character of the Republican candidates."

"They're trying to compete to see who is the Trumpiest of the Trumpsters," Peters said. "They're not talking about issues that people care about."At the same time, Peters acknowledged their own party's challenges, particularly Biden's low popularity. He said it would be up to every individual candidate to decide whether to invite the Democratic president to campaign on their behalf.

"I think the president can be helpful," Peters said of Biden. But "this is about the candidates. They're running to represent their state in the United States Senate. And they have to rise and fall by who they are as individuals."

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Trumps bid to shape GOP faces test with voters in May races - Oakland Press

Yascha Mounk is a premier commentator on the crises faced by liberal democracy and the threats posed by far-right populism. Born in Germany and now a dual-U.S. citizen, hes a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, an associate professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, and founded the heterodox commentary website Persuasion.

Hes also the author of four books, the latest of which, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, is released this week.

Mounk spoke by phone with The Daily Beast's senior opinion editor, Anthony Fisher, about the steady backsliding of democratic states in Central and Eastern Europe, the conundrum posed by racial categorization in multiethnic democracies, and why despite all the bad news, he remains optimistic about global democracys future.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.)

The past few weeks havent been great for liberal democracy. Hungarys authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won re-election, as did Serbian President Aleksandar Vui. In France, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron in the presidential runoff.

This is all disturbing, but it seems like pretty auspicious timing for a book like yours to come out! What do you make of the immediate state of democracy?

The fight against far right-populism and the fight against dictatorship is going [to] be a marathon. We scored a big win pushing Donald Trump out of office. But its become pretty clear over the course of the last 18 months that thats not the end of him. And were being reminded of how potent outright dictators, Vladimir Putin, remain on the world stage and how able they are to impose tremendous suffering.

And were seeing the internal threat for democracy from people like Viktor Orban, who use fears about demographic changes as one of their core arguments to remain in power. And [the threat] from people like Marine Le Pen, who focus very heavily on immigration in order to arouse opposition to the basic structures of our political systems remains incredibly important.

A torn poster in support of Marine Le Pen, leader of French far-right National Rally party and candidate for the 2022 French presidential election, is pictured on a billboard in Cambrai, France, April 15, 2022.

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

Can you just explain what the great experiment is in a couple of sentences?

Yeah. Most democracies in the history of the world have been very homogenous and have prided themselves on their ethnic purity. Those democracies that have been highly diverse since they were founded, like the United States, have often been based on very cruel and extreme forms of exclusion and dominationmost notably in the form of chattel slavery in America. So what we're trying to do now in the U.S. but also in many other democracies around the world, is to build multiethnic, multireligious democracies that truly treat their members as equals.

And there's no precedent for that. There isnt any great example we can point to and say, They made it work, lets copy their rules and habits, and that will tell us what to do. We are now embarking on a great experiment in the same sort of sense in which the U.S. founders embarked on a great experiment in the late 18th century, when they tried to build a large self-governing republic at a time when similar attempts throughout history had failed.

In your book, you cited George Orwell and the idea of cultural patriotism, A lot of left-of-center readers might think of the words like patriotism and nationalism in terms of exclusionary ideas or otherizing, people that are not in the in group.

Can you expand a little bit about cultural patriotism and why that can be a good thing for democracies?

Yeah, Im a German Jew, so patriotism does not come easily or naturally to me. But over the last decades, Ive become convinced that its very important for us to try and claim an inclusive form of patriotism. Because, otherwise, the worst kinds of peoplepeople like Orban and Trumpare going to use [patriotisms] enormous emotional residue for their own purposes.

Were seeing today in Ukraine that patriotismfor all its dangerscan also be a force which inspires millions of people to risk their lives to resist a dictator and fight for their independence, fight for their ability to self-govern.

The question then obviously becomes, what kind of form should that positive, inclusive patriotism take? In many countries, the historically most powerful [form] is an ethnic one, one which tries to define the true people by racial criteria, by criteria of descent, saying that immigrants and minority groups don't fully belong. That clearly is unacceptable. Its unacceptable normatively because it excludes people who have a right to be full members. And it falls empirically, because it doesnt reflect how most people now think about membership in those countries.

When philosophers are pushed to embrace some form of patriotism, they usually resort to a second kind of notionthat of civic patriotism. And I am very sympathetic to elements of that.

If Ive chosen to take up American citizenship five years ago, it is in good part because of my love of the Constitution and the basic political values that it represents. And we should certainly encourage people to identify with those ideas more strongly. [But] even so, civic patriotism fails to capture what most people actually think and feel when they think about their own country. And, in particular, it puts political ideals and values at the center of a sentiment which, for most people who are not all that interested in politics, is much more about everyday things. So I think we should add a third kind of component to civic patriotism, which is cultural patriotism.

When people say that they love the country, they say that they love its cities and landscapes. It sounds and smells. Its everyday customsand even its TikTok stars. There will always be a traditional element in that culture. There will always be some traditional costumes or some grand moments of a countrys past that people may make reference tobut what people mostly have in mind is the ever-changing, dynamic, and already incredibly diverse present.

So I think that this kind of cultural patriotism can actually reflect the diversity of our society and look towards a better future, rather than exclusively being rooted in some idealized past.

Related to cultural patriotism is whats commonly known as cultural appropriation. In the chapter, Can We Build a Meaningfully Shared Life, you kind of flipped the script on this and described it as the virtue of mutual influence. Explain why you think people who consider cultural appropriation a form of colonization might stand to look at it through a different prism.

Theres a very long tradition of people worrying that some form of cultural purity might be endangered by cultural change. Traditionally, its arrived from the far right, which [for example, in France] worried about the influence over French language. Or [the far right in Germany] worrying about the purity of the German language. Today, those fears persist on the far right, but a version of them is also increasingly, put forward by parts of the left. [Some] people have generalized the principle that any form of mutual cultural influenceespecially when it is minority groups or less-powerful groups influencing the majority of societyshould be inherently seen as suspect.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

This, to me, misses [the fact] that all the great achievements of human history have always had multiple cultural influences. That it is actually the norm rather than the exception for the things that we prize in any culture in the world to be a result of what today might be called appropriation.

The apparent plausibility of this term stems from the fact that it sometimes applied to situations [which] really are unjust. That it is applied, for example, to certain white musicians in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. who stole the songs of Black musicians and were able to profit from themwhile the Black musicians barely were able to have a career because of racist structures in [American] society. But, to me, nearly every plausible instance of when cultural appropriation really is bad can much more easily be explained in different language.

So in this case, it is obviously extremely unjust that the intellectual property of these Black singers was violated. It is obviously extremely unjust that because of how racist America was at the time, many Black singers never had the opportunities and the record deals that they deserved. But none of this would be solved by some blanket suspicion of any instance when cultures influence each other.

You wrote about a woman in Brazil, who identifies as a Pardowhich basically means shes somewhere between white and Black in Brazilian culture. And you describe a situation where shes applying for a job or a scholarship (I forget which), and she's basically made to sit in a bureaucratic office and, in her words, be examined like a zoo animal to determine whether or not shes committed racial fraud on her application.

I think a lot of Americans would be surprised that this is such an issue in Brazil, or anywhere in Latin America. But a lot of democracies are putting a premium on categorizing people by race to right past wrongs. What kind of challenges does this strategy to achieve racial justice pose for diverse democracies?

What were dealing with in a country like the U.S. are the after-effects of centuries of discrimination, which obviously continue to structure society in significant ways. That makes it very tempting to reserve certain opportunities for members of a historically oppressed group, or even for public authorities to use, racial categorizations as a decision-making lens.

At the same time, this obviously comes with a number of significant dangers. Theres the danger that a politics in which different groups are explicitly allotted certain sets of opportunities will ultimately favor the majority group, or the most powerful group, rather than the minority groups that the system is originally set up to serve.

Theres the danger that the constant use of those kinds of racial classifications actually makes them deeper, more inflexible, and perhaps more conflictual, than they otherwise might have been. And there is, of course, the danger that it does violence to the way that a large number of individualsand our society has a rapidly growing number of mixed race peoplesort of feel like they have to fit themselves into some box that doesn't actually adequately describe who they are.

I'm generally skeptical of a way in which every difficult moral question in America is framed around how something relates to some key phrase in the Constitution. I dont, for example, think that the morality of capital punishment turns on whether or not its sensible to describe it as cruel and unusual punishment. But in this particular case, I actually think the Constitution gives us a very helpful framework for how to think through this question. And that is that we should start from the equal protection clause and the idea that the government, in general, should not take race into account when it determines how it should treat particular individuals.

But, like all other rights, there can be exceptions to that under two conditionsthe first being that there needs to be a really compelling state interest for why it might become necessary to deviate from that general principle. And the second being that any use of such criteria has to be very narrowly tailored to serve that compelling state interest. That if there are acceptable alternatives which could also accomplish the same goal, which do not violate the fundamental principle of equal protection the same way, then that must always be chosen. This a basic framework on which everybody from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Antonin Scalia agrees. I think its one that we should continue to embrace.

But, of course, the question of whether or not particular affirmative action policies would pass master under thisor whether or not particular so-called race-conscious policies pass master under thisbecomes a separate controversy.

Near the end of the book, you talk about how Democratsand the pundit classjust completely got it wrong when it came to the demography is destiny thesis, which held that the demographic shifts in the U.S. would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. Obviously, thats been disproven in many ways, not just with Trump's win, but how even in defeat, his numbers with Latinos rose.

But you described this as a dangerous idea. Can you expand on that?

There's virtually nothing that Democrats and Republicans now agree on in American politics. Depressingly, the one large, ambitious theory about the social world which they do seem to agree is empirically wrong and normatively dangerous. And that is the idea of a rising demographic majority, in which the white groups that are currently voting for Republicans in greater numbers are shrinking, [while] the non-white groups which have historically verted for Democrats in greater numbers are rapidly rising.

So you can fast-forward the situation in the U.S. about two or three decades and know that so-called people of color will be the majority, and therefore Democrats and perhaps progressives are going to find it much easier to win elections.

President Donald Trump speaks during the annual Latino Coalition Legislative Summit on March 4, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

This is dangerous because it drives a form of demographic panic on the right, in which [people] like Michael Anton [later, a Trump White House adviser], who wrote an influential essay in 2016, arguing for conservatives to embrace [Trumps] candidacy because America is doomed because ofand I quotethe ceaseless importation of third world foreigners.

But its also dangerous because it can lead to a form of naive triumphalism among Democratsparticularly among progressivesin which they say we dont need to convince people of our arguments, and we dont need to recalibrate when we see that a lot of voters dont like us. We simply have to mobilize our core electorate and await for victory to fall into our lap. As we saw in 2020, as a matter of political strategy, this is naive. The only reason Donald Trump was competitive in 2020 was that he significantly improved his share of the vote among basically every single group of non-white votersincluding African Americans and Asian Americans, and especially including Latinos. Conversely the only reason why Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States is that he did much better among white voters than Hillary Clinton had done four years earlier.

But the most important point here is actually normative, rather than empirical. What many of my friends and colleagues seem to think of as some kind of utopia actually sounds deeply dystopian to me. I do not want to live in a world in which I can walk down the streetand predict with a high degree of accuracy by looking at some of the color of somebody's skinwho they just voted for. And I dont think that America is going to be a particularly pleasant society to live in for anybody, whatever the ethnicity, if a newly ascendant coalition of demographic groups ekes out a bare majority at every electionwhile a little less than half of the population with a lot of resources, a lot of wealth, and by the way, a lot of guns feels deeply excluded.

We need to build a political system that is less polarized along racial lines. That must be the goal for what our politics looks like in a few decades, even if it seems sort of aspirational now.

What are you optimistic about, when it comes to diverse democracies surviving and thriving in the future?

Well, Im pessimistic about the politics. Im pessimistic about the cultural, civil war elite that were seeing. I'm pessimistic every time I switch on cable news.

But Im actually quite optimistic about developments in society, more broadly. Im quite optimistic about what our society looks like on questions of diversity on the ground. Thirty or 40 years ago, a majority of Americans still thought that the idea of interracial marriage was morally bad. That number is thankfully down to the single digits. We know that this isnt just people telling pollsters what they want to hear, because theres been a huge increase in the number of interracial marriages and in the number of mixed race children. Thirty or 40 years ago, the top echelons of society were nearly exclusively white. Whether youre looking at Hollywood, politics, business, or the nonprofit sectorthat simply is no longer the case today.

The strange thing about this moment is that two different kinds of pessimisms overlap. Theres the pessimism of the ultranationalist far right which says that immigrants or minority groups are somehow inferior, that they dont really want to integrate, and that they are therefore doing terribly. Donald Trump infamously said in 2016 that African Americans should vote for him because they had nothing to lose.

At the same time, many of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances on the left tend to fear that many of the immigrants that are coming to the United States nowwho arent whitesimply will not get a chance to integrate and to succeed in our society because of the extent of racism discrimination.

People from a total of 27 nations participate in a Naturalization Ceremony in Brooklyn on June 14, 2019 in New York City.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Now there are of course real problems, and there is of course, real racism and real discrimination in our society, and its very important to emphasize and acknowledge that. But, thankfully, that pessimism is just as wrong. The best studies indicate that immigrants who come to today from El Salvador and Mexico and Zimbabwe are rising on the educational and economic ladders just as quickly as Italian Americans and Irish Americans did a hundred years ago.

Its also true that modern immigrants to the U.S. learn English at roughly the same levels as they have in the pastboth in the first generation and subsequent generations.

Absolutely. With language, there's a very clear model. Obviously, a lot of people who come to the countryespecially from places where they haven't had as good an education, or if they come to [the U.S.] when theyre already a little bit olderstruggle to learn English, and often live in the U.S. for decades without learning very good English. But the children, in the great majority of cases, speak the language of their parents but prefer to speak English with their friends, siblings, and others. And the grandchildren barely speak the language of origin at all anymorewhich is a shame in certain ways, by the way.

What all of this shows is that these two pessimisms are, thankfully, wrong.

These immigrants are not somehow inferior to native Americans or to previous generations of Americans. But also, despite the discrimination and racism which truly does exist, they are capable of succeeding. Our society is not as impermeable. Its worth noting, by the way, that [polls show] Latinos and African Americans are actually more optimistic about Americas future, than the average white person is today.

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Don't PanicDemocracy's in Trouble, but It's Not Dying. Author Yascha Mounk on Populism, Diversity, and Hope. - The Daily Beast

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pp., $28)

You cant judge a book by its release date. Coming at a time when the direction of right-wing politics in America is the subject of fierce intellectual, institutional, and personal dispute, Matthew Continettis latest book would certainly be an opportune occasion for a sustained argument via historical analogy: this or that faction in todays internecine right-wing warfare is doomed to failure or destined for success, just as their forebears once were. But Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Washington Free Beacon columnist, has written a book that succeeds more straightforwardly as a definitive work of intellectual historyframing the American Rights current situation as the latest stage in a long process during which conservatism went from being a default condition of American political life to the rehabilitative project of a counter-elite of intellectuals to a mass movement that united both alienated voters and alienated elites.

The choices he makes in the construction of that history suggest certain arguments. Continetti begins not in the aftermath of World War II, when National Review and attendant institutions organized around opposition to Rockefeller Republicanism and began to define a package of ideas that one could call conservative, but in the 1920s, when Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge paired a hands-off approach to business with protection for domestic institutions and patriotism with foreign policy restraint. When its political leaders took those positions, and when its intellectuals expressed skepticism of the utility of democracy, the American Right of the 1920s resembled the national populism of today. When those leaders defended their conservatism as a continuation of normal American life with temperate and persuasive rhetoric, it didnt. Undone by events in any case, conservatism found itself in the intellectual wilderness between the Great Depression and the New Deal, its politicians too out of touch with the popular mood and its intellectuals too self-consciously marginal to command mass support. But the ideas circulating on the American Right in the 1920s shaped the movement that would come afteran important adjustment to the canonical mythology of the conservative movement that tends to begin after World War II.

Continetti makes another modification to this narrative when he shows that the rise of the conservative movement did not owe simply to the development and dissemination of ideas. Postwar movement conservatism began as a renegade project of intellectuals seeking to unwind the New Deal and purge the Republican Party of its Rockefeller moderates; it would become an ideological factory for Ronald Reagan, the most popular American president since FDR. It could do this because its principal figures actively engaged in politics and events. The movement, however, has long privileged the force of its ideas, which allegedly drive history and explain Republican political success. Such a view can do little to explain contingencies like the 1962 hotel meeting called by the American Enterprise Institutes then-president Bill Baroody, in which William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Russell Kirk agreed to take on the John Birch Societys Robert Welch and helped clear the way for Goldwaters presidential run. Ideas certainly matter, but they cant always explain why things happen as they do.

Continettis book weaves together major events in American political history with portraits of various intellectual and political figures. It offers a compelling analysis of the past failures and enduring difficulties of the Right on racial issues. Lacking a systematic account of why historical events happen, it sometimes leaves unexplained the reasons certain factions waxed and waned. But a persistent conflict drives Continettis narrative: that between populism and elitism.

Perpetually sensitive to charges of being insufficiently right-wing, elite factions often policed their rightward flank by attacking it on grounds not of morality but of tactics. Richard Nixon preserved his credentials on the right in a 1954 speech by reframing the dispute about Joseph McCarthy, who had the right enemies but was making it easier on the rats he sought to destroy. Goldwater advocated against George Wallaces 1972 presidential candidacy not because Wallace was odious but because a vote for him would aid the Left. And Continetti himself engages in this maneuver, writing that while one populist surge reinforced the sense among conservatives that they were participating in an embattled counterrevolution, these figures had actually embraced demagogy [that] pushed the political system to its limit, endangering their cause by associating it with crackpot theories and embarrassing theatrics. Name that culprit.

The tension between populism and elitism becomes more urgent as the book proceeds. In the 1960s, National Reviews Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell sparred over whether freedom was worth defending on its own terms, or only inasmuch as it served the cause of virtue. (Not only Bozell but George W. Bush anticipated todays call for a politics of the common good, with the 43rd president advancing before the Iraq debacle a fleshed-out philosophy of government activism in the service of moral ideals informed by religion.) By the 1970s, the fight had moved to the domain of mass politics. Conservatism was becoming more political, more topical, more journalistic, less philosophical, and above all more populist, Continetti observes, led by a network of activists who called themselves the New Right and opposed compromise, gradualism, and acquiescence in a corrupt system. Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie questioned the alignment between elite conservative organs and their alleged constituents, who were motivated by social, moral, and religious causes.

If these groups had anything in common, it was the feeling that they were besieged on all sides. When Buckley founded National Review, he attacked the intellectual establishment that ran just about everything. When journalists and academics united with the Democratic Party to portray Goldwater as a dangerous extremist, Meyer lamented the formidable opposition of the mass communication network. Talk of a distributed conspiracy perpetrated unconsciously by the organs of academia, entertainment, and media is popular on todays dissident Right, but the idea is far from original.

Yet a stable synthesis between elite and populist right-wing politics remained elusive. Since 1920, factions on the right have sought to embody true conservatism by defining themselves against their enemies, who are deemed unfit to carry the banner. Consider the battle between traditionalists and neoconservatives, which intensified in the 1980s. Having once identified as anti-Stalinist socialists but moved to the right as the country was dragged to the left, neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol brought the political skills they learned from old scraps, the credibility that came with their association with mainstream institutions, and a degree of policy sophistication rooted in emerging methods of social science. Traditionalists such as Patrick J. Buchanan criticized them as impostors who had accommodated themselves to the state and embraced an interventionist foreign policy, perhaps because their loyalties lay elsewhere (in, say, Tel Aviv).

Neoconservatives believed that they were defending liberalism, not negating it as more traditional conservatives sought to do, Continetti writes. Paleoconservatives such as Sam Francis, meantime, saw the expansion of the state as a world-historical revolution of mass and scale that threatened, in Franciss words, to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society. A conservatism that seeks to conserve onlythe liberal institutions erected by the Founders, in this view, is unprepared toreverse the relentless leftward march of American society and doomed to play court jester forever.

Today, the populistelite conflict breaks down along slightly different lines. Figures from both camps agree that progressive control of major institutions is pathologizing dissent and irrevocably transforming the national culture. But populists view elite conservatives as complicit in enabling this transformation and regard the muscular use of state power as the best possible way to resist it, while those elites who still retain an affiliation with conservative causes lament the loss of skepticism about state power and the tactically counterproductive measures undertaken to arrest progressive gains.

Nevertheless, after retelling Donald Trumps stunning rise and disastrous fallall while doing more than most populists to give populism its due and establish its importance to the American RightContinetti seems finally to declare his affiliation with populisms critics in a way that will likely earn him their rebuke. Trump, he argues, exposed a mismatch between elite priorities and mass concerns for which the elites are certainly culpable, but his dominance of the Republican Party and the conservative movement must be stopped. A conservatism anchored to Trump the man will face insurmountable obstacles in attaining policy coherence, government competence and intellectual credibility, Continetti writes. Citing Buckley, George F. Will, Friedrich Hayek, and Harvey Mansfield, Continetti concludes that what makes American conservatism distinctly American is its preservation of the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious, and political institutions that incarnate and sustain it.

Is such a restoration possible? Continetti is too astute a historian to be optimistic. Conservatives alienation from mainstream institutions makes the rare opportunities to feel renewed pride in themselves and their country all the more attractive. History indicates that any attempts to criticize figures such as Trump on moral grounds or for insufficient ideological rigor will be self-defeating. Still, Continettis structural account of conservative power also suggests another possibility. American conservatism receives its political potency from median Americans sick of progressive overreach. It endures as a necessary corrective, a stubborn expression of democratic sentiment that erupts every time a faction gains institutional dominance and wields it irresponsibly. Trumps chaotic, narcissistic behaviorand the continuing dedication of Republican and conservative factions to him and his obsessionsconstitutes its own kind of overreach, one that risks alienating the broad middle of Americans with whom the party would otherwise find much affinity. Trump may continue to exert an influence on the right for years to come, but his growing disconnection from the concerns of such ordinary Americans provides reason to believe that a more sober conservative politics can one day emerge.

Theodore Kupfer is an associate editor of City Journal.

Photo:Prostock-Studio/iStock

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Review of 'The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism' - City Journal

I recently wrote about how international trade has made some Western nations Germany in particular unwilling to confront autocracy. Germany hasnt just been weak-kneed in its response to Vladimir Putin; it and other European nations have stood by and even continued to provide economic aid to Hungary while Viktor Orban dismantles democracy.

In response, I received mail from Europeans to the effect that American democracy is also under threat and that some of our right-wing politicians are every bit as bad as Orban. Agreed! But that wasnt the point of my argument. And while Im quite willing to believe, for example, that Ron DeSantis would be Floridas Orban if he could, state governors dont have as much repressive power as rulers of sovereign nations.

Still, the comparison of European and U.S. ethnonationalists raises some interesting questions. In particular, as the G.O.P. has become a full-on antidemocratic party, why has it also remained the party of plutocrats and the enemy of any policy that might help its many working-class supporters?

To understand the puzzle, consider the policy positions of Marine Le Pen, who has a serious chance of becoming Frances next president. Her party, National Rally previously called the National Front is often described as right-wing. And on social issues it is; in particular, the party is largely defined by its hostility to immigrants and the alleged threat they pose to Frances national identity. On economic policy, however, Le Pen is if anything to the left of President Emmanuel Macron.

Now, its important to understand the context. France provides social benefits on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: universal health care, huge family benefits and more. Macron isnt challenging the fundamentals of that system. He is, however, trying to trim some benefits, notably by raising the retirement age. Le Pen, by contrast, actually wants to reduce the retirement age for some workers.

I am not making a case for Le Pen. If she wins, the consequences for France, Europe and the world will be terrifying. But there is some genuine populism advocacy of policies that might actually help workers in her platform.

Compare that with the positions taken by prominent U.S. Republicans. I cant tell you what the official Republican economic program is, because the party doesnt have one in fact, it has made a point of not saying what it will do if it regains power.

We do, however, know what the party did when it was last in power: It gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy, while almost succeeding in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would have caused tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance. Theres no reason to believe it wont once again pursue anti-worker, pro-plutocrat policies if it regains control.

At the state level, the debacle in Kansas has apparently done nothing to shake Republicans faith in the magical power of tax cuts for the affluent. Mississippi Americas poorest state, with the lowest life expectancy and facing a collapse of its rural hospitals is slashing income taxes.

And recently Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the Republican senatorial campaign, released a Rescue America plan that called for tax increases on the half of Americans whose incomes are low enough that they dont pay income taxes (even though they pay payroll taxes, sales taxes and so on). He also warned, falsely, that Social Security and Medicare are headed for bankruptcy, without offering any suggestions about how to preserve them.

Senior Republicans have said that they dont support Scotts agenda, but havent explained what their actual agenda is and have left Scott in his key campaign position, suggesting that his views have wide support within the party.

So everything suggests that the Republican Party is as pro-wealthy, anti-worker as ever. Unlike right-wing European parties, it hasnt made any gestures toward actual populism. Why?

The answer, presumably, is that the G.O.P. caters to plutocrats, even as it attacks elites, because it thinks it can. After all, being nice to plutocrats and crony capitalists can yield tangible rewards, not just in the form of campaign contributions but also in the form of personal enrichment.

And the Republican Party doesnt believe that it will pay any price for pursuing these rewards. It believes that its supporters will focus on denunciations of critical race theory and buy into conspiracy theories almost half of Republicans agree that top Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking while not even being aware of what the party is doing for the very rich. After The Times revealed Jared Kushners highly questionable $2 billion deal with the Saudis, Fox News simply ignored the report, while harping endlessly on Hunter Biden.

I wish I could say with any confidence that this cynicism will backfire. But I cant. In particular, Democrats who want to campaign on bread-and-butter issues are assuming that voters will understand whos actually buttering their bread. And that doesnt look at all like a safe assumption.

Link:

Opinion | The G.O.P. Is Still the Party of Plutocrats - The New York Times