Category Archives: Populism

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio said on Thursday that the US appears to be on the path to "some form of civil war."

Dalio based his analysis on historical cases arguing that the combination of financial burdens, such as large deficits, high taxes and inflation, and large wealth and value gaps in a nation "leads to some sort of fighting for control."

"Maybe my views are right and maybe they're wrong," he wrote in a LinkedIn post summarizing excerpts from his book, "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order.""My goal is simply to pass along what I see for you to consider for yourself."

Dalio is the founder and co-chief investor of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, with nearly $150 billion in assets under management.

He also argued that the country is witnessing greater amounts of populism and extremism, and outlined what he believes is a path to civil war through the lens of historical examples. A big divide, he said, is the gap between right-wing and left-wing politics, where both "sides" are "unwilling to compromise."

First, he said, extremists become the majority and respecting the rule of law becomes secondary to winning at all costs. Them, he argued, both moderates and the ability to compromise become diluted, leading to civil wars.

"Notably, when that happens at the same time as there are foreign powers that are becoming strong enough to challenge the leading world power that is encountering this civil war dynamic, it is an especially risky period," he added, saying that he thinks the US is currently in this period.

"By most of the measures that I use, the current financial conditions and irreconcilable differences in desires and values are consistent with the ingredients leading to some form of civil war."

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Billionaire investor says US seems to be on path to 'civil war' - Business Insider

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After two years of a demoralizing global pandemic: Canadians are highly polarized, deeply divided and just itching to lash out.

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We all have them in our social networks: the old high school classmate who was out cheering on the Freedom Convoy as it passed Friday; the childhood friend who posted pictures of herself crying tears of joy from a highway overpass decked out in Canadian flags; the cousins wife who posted a picture of a transport truck sporting profanities aimed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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The protest may have ridden a wave of support on its cross-country trek to Ottawa to oppose vaccine mandates in particular and pandemic restrictions in general. But it may have difficulty maintaining its appeal after a weekend during which the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was desecrated, staff at a local homeless shelter harassed, the memorial statue of Terry Fox dressed up and Ottawa police, city workers and small business owners intimidated by a maskless mob flouting public health rules in the name of freedom.

Some early adopters may be feeling sheepish now, having spoken out in favour of movement where far-right groups felt comfortable displaying Confederate flags, Nazi swastikas and QAnon logos. But others are digging in their heels claiming fake news or that any malfeasance was committed by instigators looking to undermine their cause.

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The group behind the blockade of big rigs that has downtown Ottawa paralyzedmay call itself Canadian Unity, but it is having the opposite effect on the public at large.

Social media is being weaponized . Neighbours are turning against each other in virtual community forums where they usually share tips on contractors and seek help finding their lost pets. And many people find themselves torn over whether to unfollow friends and family who have shown their true colours.

All of this, however, is a barometer indicating the state of the Canadian polity 23 months into a demoralizing global pandemic: it is highly polarized, deeply divided and just itching to lash out.

The temptation is strong to turn away, to block our ears to a toxic discourse especially among the vast majority of Canadians who are vaccinated and watching from a distance (with apologies to Ottawa residents who are caught in the middle of this standoff). But we do so at our own peril.

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Political leaders must not be too dismissive of this outpouring of outrage and anger outright.

Extremist elements may be magnetically attracted to this cause and its organizers may have far-right leanings. But most Canadians who waved flags on viaducts are not a fringe minority as Trudeau called the demonstrators Monday in an outdoor remote press conference shortly after he announced he had tested positive for COVID-19. There must be a recognition that this event was fuelled by many ordinary Canadians fed up with the fallout from the pandemic and seeking an outlet for their frustrations.

The thrall of populism is as strong and intoxicating as the diesel fumes wafting in the air around Parliament Hill these days. And Canadians are not immune.

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The fact is, a growing segment of the increasingly weary population is becoming evermore susceptible to the empty promises of simplistic slogans, the rejection of science, misinformation and distrust of government and institutions. They are being lured down a rabbit hole in incremental steps that could nevertheless have far-reaching consequences for Canadian democracy and society.

Even if Canadians voted in another Liberal minority government only a few short months ago, many did so out of resignation. Trudeau is a target of exasperation and enmity from far beyond the truckers idling their engines to keep warm in Ottawa. He has to be aware of this reality.

So too, should provincial premiers. It may be lost on members of the Freedom Convoy that many of the regulations they oppose were actually introduced by the provinces, but even Franois Legault, who has maintained his popularity despite Quebec having the harshest public health restrictions in the country, should pay heed. With a proposed anti-vax tax that is more of a ploy to placate the vaccinated, Legault risks provoking a similar backlash.

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Trudeau ruled out dialogue with the protest organizers. But without giving in to irresponsible demands, he and other political leaders must open a new conversation with disaffected Canadians at their wits end after almost two years.

In turn, Canadians need to stand on guard for democracy. Weve witnessed up close how quickly ugliness can be unleashed when anger, ignorance and apathy get the better of a dispirited population. We must not take our politics for granted or let it degenerate into incivility and disrespect.

This country needs to find an antidote to populism and fast.

ahanes@postmedia.com

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Hanes: Beware the intoxicating thrall of populism - Montreal Gazette

And just like that, week one of Foxs newest showJesse Watters Primetimeis coming to a close. What have we learned from the hour-long program that billed itself as a platform for exposing scoundrels and celebrating patriots?

In the premiere episode, Jesse Watters, who has spent two decades at Fox, cohosts The Five, and previously had his own weekend show, promised viewers he would use his new program to stand up for regular Americans who have been disrespected for far too long. Sounds familiar, and indeed Watters used the opening monologue to try on his best Tucker Carlson impression, mimicking his more notorious colleagues faux-populist rage toward nameless elites while condemning Wall Street corruption and Americas shamefully mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ignorant, greedy leaders sold out our factories and pride to the Chinese Communists for unpatriotic profits, Watters said. Sick cyber warriors divided us by race to distract us from the real division: class.

Carlsons show has long dominated Fox Newss ratings, with more than 3 million average viewers on a nightly basis last year and an endless stream of viral clips to prove it, and it seems that Wattersand the networkknow a winning formula when they see it. To borrow a phrase from the NFL analysts, its a copycat league, and Watters show, for now at least, serves up the same Fox Corpapproved right-wing populism that viewers have grown accustomed to during Carlsons reign as the king of cable news. Though, Watters does offer viewers a lighter, more comedic touch than the self-serious host runningthe 8 p.m. hour. Rather than scowling at liberal elites with Tucker Facepinched eyebrows, head cocked to the side, mouth slightly ajarWatters wears a near-constant smirk. Rather than hamming up the righteous indignation, he casually laughs off figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, often lazily dropping in barely relevant movie clips mid-monologue to hit punchlines or drive home points for him. Though, Watterss reliance on cheap humor from his production crew might be for the best, given that his droning, one-track voice lacks the range necessary to believably sell fist-slamming-desk rage and conviction. Perhaps sensing his constraints as a solo act, the showrunners at Fox packed the opening week of Watterss show with A-list Trumpworld guests, including Mike Pence, Jeanine Pirro, Dan Bongino, and Eric Trump.

Presentation aside, the similarities between Watters and Carlsons programming are hard to miss, and it is difficult to imagine a world in which the formers show exists without the latter laying the groundwork for it. Like Carlson, a Trinity College alumnus, Watters, also a Trinity grad, is suddenly a champion of the working class who is speaking out against corporate powers and Democratic leaders who he believes have abandoned blue-collar Americans. Carlson even has Watterswho, not too long ago, was Foxs de facto spring break correspondentdiscussing far-right European populism, with the two weighing in on Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbns immigration policies during an episode of The Five this week. Somehow, the pair seem to have developed the same fascination with why female cartoons are now dressing less sexy, a description that Carlson used last week while fuming over the makeovers of M&Ms candy mascots. Watters, presumably after seeing all the attention that Carlson received for speaking out against sexually unappealing animated chocolates, spent a segment of his Wednesday show lamenting Disneys decision to change Minnie Mouses wardrobe. I cant believe Im actually saying this, but Disney is totally changing Minnie Mouse. Disney is putting Minnie Mouse in a pantsuit, said Watters, before asserting that Disney executives must be bored out of their minds and theyre just making it all uncomfortable for the rest of us.

Another cause that Watters jumped on board with this week is the day tradersmaking a fortune or a name for themselves outside the confines of corporate America. This appeared to be a reference to incidents like last years GameStop short squeeze, when small-time traders helped the video game retailers stock surge in an attempt to beat out major financial firms that were attempting to short its stock. At the time, Carlson praised the Reddit guys who rallied around GameStop, saying that they sent a message to Wall Street. Likewise, Watters has made appeals to this demographic of young and very online traders, some of whom have criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosis involvement in the stock market. So while Nancy slow-walks antitrust legislation to break up Big Tech, her family [is] taking advantage and laughing all the way to the bank. They must think were idiots, Watters said during a segment dubbing Pelosi The Wolf of Washington.

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With Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox Dips Another Toe in the Populist Culture Wars - Vanity Fair

The good thing about the budget is its conservatism. It expects nominal GDP to increase by a relatively low 11.1 percent in 2022-23, well below the 17 percent plus increase in the current fiscal year. Its also rather low if we consider the real GDP growth of 8-8.5 projected in the Economic Survey. The last time nominal growth was around that level was in 2017-18, when it was 11.03 percent, with real GDP growth being 6.8 percent.

That conservatism is also reflected in its expenditure projections. For all the talk about a huge rise in capital expenditure, the governments total capex in the current fiscal year, including from extra-budgetary sources, according to the revised estimates, will be Rs11.05 lakh crore, much lower than the total budgeted capex of Rs 11.37 lakh crore. Moreover, the fine print says that revised estimates for 2021-22 include capital infusion and loans to Air India for settlement of past liabilities, amounting to Rs 51971 crore. So that number too needs to be excluded. Simply put, while the budgetary resources for capex have been increased, capex by public enterprises is lower.

A similar situation is expected to play out in 2022-23 too. While spending on capex from budgetary resources is expected to go up substantially, total budgetary capex, including from the resources of public enterprises, is Rs 12.20 lakh crore, an increase of just 10.4 percent over the revised estimates. Worse, the increase in the total budgeted capex is a mere 7.3 percent of the total budgeted capex for the current fiscal year.

In short, while much was made in the budget speech about higher public capex, perhaps that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Even so, the silver lining is that the percentage increase in capital expenditure will be higher than that of revenue spending. The increase in total expenditure envisaged in the budget is just 4.6 percent more than the revised estimates. In fact, revenue expenditure, less interest payments, is budgeted to be lower in 2022-23 than in the current year.

How is this feat proposed to be achieved? Outlays under central sector schemes and projects have been slashed, and finance commission grants to states are budgeted to be lower. Theres also some reduction in establishment expenditure. Its very likely, though, that the expenditure will be higher than budgeted in 2022-23.

What the expenditure numbers tell us is that the government isnt buying the argument that consumption needs to be supported further. Subsidies on food and fertiliser have been substantially reduced. The outlay on MGNREGS is the same as in the last budget and substantially lower than in the revised estimates. Perhaps the hope is that as the economy re-opens, growth will provide jobs, which in turn will support consumption.

On the revenue side, gross tax receipts are budgeted at 10.7 percent of GDP, lower by a bit than the current years 10.8 percent.

The problem lies in excise duties, which have been budgeted much lower, because of the cuts in duties on fuel. Leaving out excise duties, the gross tax revenues budgeted for 2022-23 are 9.4 percent of GDP against 9.1 percent this year. Thats not too much of an increase, but then it needs to be seen in the context of the nominal GDP increasing by over 17 percent in the current fiscal against the budgeted rise of only 11.1 percent for 2022-23.

Despite the fiscal deficit for 2022-23 being lower, as a percentage of GDP, at 6.4 percent, compared to the revised estimate of 6.9 percent for the current fiscal year, the budget will still provide an increased stimulus, albeit a small one. Thats because the fiscal deficit in absolute terms is higher by Rs 70,107crore.

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Conservative budget that needs to be commended for resisting populism before elections - Moneycontrol

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Researchers say the pandemic has given conspiracy theorists an opportunity to "make alliances in order to advance their political agendas.

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Some of Quebecs most popular conspiracy theorists have preyed on peoples fears and frustrations during the COVID-19 pandemic to drive their own political agendas, a new study says.

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At the same time, it warns, leaders from different areas where conspiracies are known to take hold including far-right groups, and certain religious and spiritual communities have found common ground during the pandemic and are now more intertwined than before.

Many of these groups are politically on the far right and also influenced by religious beliefs, Martin Geoffroy, the director of the program behind the study, said on Monday.

Whats changed is that, before the pandemic, most of them were in their own little spheres. But the pandemic has offered them an opportunity to make alliances in order to advance their political agendas.

The study was published Monday by the Centre for Expertise and Training on Religious Fundamentalism and Radicalization (CEFIR), which operates out of CEGEP douard-Montpetit in Longueuil. Researchers examined nearly 500 videos published online by some of Quebecs most popular so-called complotistes between November 2020 and January 2021.

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Overall, the study suggests those pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation in the province can be divided into two ideological matrices: the far-right and religious or spiritual movements.

Those that fall under the far-right category, it says, include people belonging to nationalist and identitarian groups, as well as the sovereign citizens and survivalism movements. On the religious and spiritual side, the study also identified three main components: the New Age movement, Catholic integralism, and Protestant fundamentalism.

Many of the influencers mentioned in the study were already spreading conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment before the pandemic. But with people spending more time online and frustrations growing, theyve seen their popularity and influence increase over the last two years.

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For Geoffroy, this was to be expected.

All groups that draw on populism on the far right capitalize on fear, and the pandemic has been a great opportunity structure to create fear, he said.

Times are tough, many people have lost their jobs, then they come with the magical solution to all your problems. Theyll say, The pandemic isnt over? Well end it by overthrowing the government, he added. It wont happen, but they draw on that to further push their agenda.

Geoffroy pointed to this weekends convoy protest in Ottawa as an example.

Though the convoy was promoted as a protest against vaccine mandates for truckers, it has since morphed into a call for all public health measures to be lifted. People with far-right connections and links to white supremacist groups, including several the study focused on, have also participated. Over the weekend, at least one truck flew a Confederate flag and Nazi symbols and slogans were seen in the crowd.

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It was very hard this weekend to know who was representing this movement, Geoffroy said. But basically all of these types of groups were there.

Among the people whose online activity researchers studied was Mario Roy , a former member of right-wing groups Storm Alliance and La Meute whos called on members of the National Assembly to be arrested for high treason over pandemic measures. As well as Franois Amalega Bitondo , an anti-mask protester whos under court order to stay away from Premier Franois Legault.

Also mentioned in the study is Alexis Cossette-Trudel , another key conspiracy theorist in Quebec. Cossette-Trudel, who has a significant online following, has argued the pandemic is a part of a plot by the deep state to undermine former United States president Donald Trump a plan he believes Legault is part of.

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As for the religious side, the study details how a Montreal pastor, who has openly defied health measures, began collaborating with a well-known far-right activist during the pandemic. The report says the pastor has frequently equated health measures with Satanism promoted by atheistic communists seeking to take control of the planet.

The study also looked into the influence of certain Quebecers who identify with the New Age movement, a network of people who generally subscribe to a variety of beliefs about spirituality and natural health. During the pandemic, however, the report says their discourse has become more conspiratorial, often blaming modern medicine for COVID-19 and spreading debunked theories about the dangers of the vaccine.

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The illustrate the point, the study quotes one influencer with thousands of followers across her different online platforms.

You have to look at it as a gift when you have an illness. Even if you have a little acute illness like a cold, or like COVID right, the imaginary COVID, she said in November 2020. Its a cleansing illness. An acute illness with what I call cleansing symptoms.

Geoffroy said it can be hard to tell, sometimes, which of these people actually believe what theyre saying and which ones are only doing it for their personal gain. And, he added, he understands how some would like to label conspiracy theorists as unhinged people who are simply spreading nonsense.

But thats exactly what the study warns against doing, he said.

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Some of them might be, but most of them are only using conspiracy theories to advance their political agenda, which is a far-right agenda, he said. And people dont always realize that.

jfeith@postmedia.com

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Quebec conspiracy theorists prey on fears and frustrations: study - Montreal Gazette

Donald Trump listens to the crowd cheer during a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa.

Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Populist parties and politicians lost support all over the world during the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of more than half a million people has found.

Published Tuesday by Cambridge University's Bennett Institute for Public Policy, the study had more than half a million participants across 109 countries. The research team has been monitoring participants' political attitudes since 2020.

According to the report, there are clear signs that the so-called "populist wave" which saw radical and anti-establishment leaders, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, rise to power could be diminishing.

The mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis by populist leaders, a desire for stability and a decline in polarizing attitudes were swaying public opinion away from populist sentiment, researchers said. Populist leaders were also considered to be less trustworthy as sources of Covid-related information than their centrist counterparts, the poll found.

The pandemic prompted a shift toward technocratic politics, the paper said, which bolstered trust in governments and experts such as scientists.

"The story of politics in recent years has been the emergence of anti-establishment politicians who thrive on the growing distrust of experts," Roberto Foa, the report's lead author, said in a press release Tuesday. "From [Turkey's] Erdogan and [Brazil's] Bolsonaro to the 'strong men' of Eastern Europe, the planet has experienced a wave of political populism. Covid-19 may have caused that wave to crest."

Foa added that support for anti-establishment parties had collapsed worldwide in a way that wasn't being seen for more "mainstream" politicians.

Co-author Xavier Romero-Vidal added that the pandemic had created "a sense of shared purpose that may have reduced the political polarization we've seen over the last decade."

"This could help explain why populist leaders are struggling to mobilise support," he said.

Between the spring of 2020 and the final quarter of 2021, populist leaders have seen an average approval rating decline of 10 percentage points, the study found. In Europe, the proportion of people intending to vote for a populist party fell by an average of 11 percentage points to 27% during the same period.

While European support for incumbent parties increased during early lockdowns, the continent's governing populist parties including Italy's Five Star Movement and Hungary's Fidesz experienced the largest declines in support.

Opposition populist parties also lost support during the pandemic, while "mainstream" opposition parties gained supporters.

Approval of the way governments handled the Covid crisis also showed rising skepticism toward populist leaders' competence. In June 2020, public approval of how countries with populist leaders had handled the pandemic was an average 11 percentage points lower than approval of countries with centrist governments. By the end of 2020, the gap had widened to 16 points.

Statements associated with populism, such as a dislike for "corrupt elites" and a desire for the "will of the people" to be obeyed, also saw a decline in support, the report found. The number of people saying they agreed with similar statements fell by around 10 percentage points in Italy, the U.K. and France between 2019 and 2021.

Meanwhile, researchers found that political "tribalism" signaled by party supporters expressing a "strong dislike" of those who voted for opposing politicians had declined in most countries. In the U.S., however, this so-called tribalism had not abated.

Despite the findings, researchers said that the decline in populist support had not led to greater faith in liberal democracy.

While trust in governments steadily climbed throughout the pandemic, rising by an average of 3.4 percentage points across the world's democratic nations, faith in democracy as a political system plateaued.

"Satisfaction with democracy has recovered only slightly since the post-war nadir of 2019, and is still well below the long-term average," Foa said. "Some of the biggest declines in democratic support during the pandemic were seen in Germany, Spain and Japan nations with large elderly populations particularly vulnerable to the virus."

In the U.S., the number of participants who considered democracy a bad way to run their country more than doubled from 10.5% in 2019 to 25.8% in 2021.

The research team found that globally, many individuals instead favored technocratic sources of authority, such as allowing experts to make policy decisions.

By the summer of 2020, the belief that experts should be allowed to make decisions "according to what they think best for the country" had risen 14 points to 62% in Europe and 8 points to 57% in the United States.

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Populist politics lost support globally during the pandemic, research finds - CNBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The latest Tory threat to use the navy to stop refugees in the English Channel has been ripped to shreds. This week Boris Johnson, possibly to distract from his partying habits, signed off on a cruel and inhumane plan to hand control of the channel to the military. But two security scholars have pulled this pledge apart.

Professor Timothy Edmonds and research associate Scott Edwards, both from the University of Bristol, published their critique in The Conversation. The pair looked at key Tory claims around the issue. But they werent particularly convinced.

Home secretary Priti Patel then told the Commons on Tuesday 18 January, that she had commissioned the MoD [Ministry of Defence] as a crucial operational partner to protect our Channel against illegal migration. She spoke of a blended approach which she said the public would support.

While the Ministry of Defence said:

Unacceptable numbers of people continue to make the dangerous Channel crossings and last Novembers tragic deaths serve as the strongest reminder of the need to stop them.

The Bristol academics debunking starts with the maths. They said that while on the face of it navy ships outnumber Border Force ships, this is itself deceiving. The Archer and River class ships which would be most useful are already in use as far away as the Indo-Pacific, Gibraltar, the Caribbean and the Falklands/Malvinas.

They added:

Read on...

With so many vessels already in use elsewhere, it seems unlikely that the Admiralty will welcome new deployments to the Channel - especially so soon after anannouncementthat Border Force is receiving money for an upgraded fleet of cutters.

So it seems that the navy lacks the ships for the task, and the political will to do the job anyway.

Secondly, the pair questioned how naval involvement would change anything even if the capacity was found. They also tested the underlying motivations:

Perhaps there is a hope that the Royal Navy will put some backbone into this policy, especially given that Border Forces union has recentlythreatened strikes if pushbacks are implemented.

But would the navy even have the authority to carry out the governments cruel and inhumane anti-refugee operations? Legally, this doesnt seem to be the case at all.

Edmonds and Edward warned that if the navy did start to push back small boats crossing the channel, they would breach long established maritime law:

This is enshrined inArticle 98of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea andelsewhere. The Royal Navy is just as bound by the law of the sea as Border Force.

They wrote:

The navy has already indicated that it haslittle appetite for such pushbacks, and any extra capacity it can bring is most likely to be deployed in search and rescue tasks.

This leads to questions about what the navy can actually do in the Channel. As the authors point out, not much more than they already are. The authors registered surprise at the announcement of a blended response. Because that is exactly whats already happening.

They say the navy has been increasingly integrated into border operations since 2010. One recent expression of this blended approach is:

The Joint Maritime Security Centre, established in 2020, coordinates the UKs maritime assets and helps different agencies to work together at sea. Hosted by the navy, it enables cross-agency information sharing through itsMaritime Domain Awareness programme.

So if this is already happening and has been for a decade we should question why Priti Patel is calling for it anyway.

Edmonds and Edwards proposed a different approach. They said:

The UK needs to move beyond populist announcements on the small boat problem and develop a response along three lines.

First, it should continue to develop better interagency operations. Secondly, it should foster closer cooperation with France and Belgium to help manage this shared problem of human desperation and misery. And thirdly, it should recognise that policing at sea can only addresssymptoms rather than causes of increased Channel crossings.

They added:

A long-term solution requires the reestablishment of humane and accessible refugee and migration routes into the UK.

The Tories have made a habit of using refugee-bashing and the militarist populism to distract from their internal problems. This latest call looks much the same. But this time the incoherence of such callous inhumane plans has been laid bare.

Johnson and Patel seem oblivious to the fact theyve blood on their hands when it comes to refugees crossing the Channel and instead want to talk the talk. But even if the navy did have the capacity to intervene in the channel, doing so does nothing to address the root causes of the refugee crisis.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/LA Phot Nicky Wilson, cropped to 770 x 440, under Open Government Licence.

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Patel's navy Channel threat once again exposes the Tory's militarist populism - The Canary

Globalisation has had a profound impact on migration, with improving connections between states resulting in more people than ever before choosing to live and work in other countries. Yet as Leila Simona Talani explains, this process has been contradictory, with many of the migration crises the world has witnessed in recent decades having their roots in globalisation. Drawing on a new book, she outlines the dark side of the relationship between globalisation and international migration.

The events unfolding daily in relation to migration, from the crisis at the border between Belarus and Poland, to the never-ending deaths in the Mediterranean, underline the dark side of globalisation. This is the conclusion that I reach in my new book, The International Political Economy of Migration in the Globalization Era, which analyses how the different approaches in international political economy address the relationship between globalisation and migration.

Globalisation emerges from this investigation as a process ridden with contradictions, whose consequences increase social discrepancies and geographical marginalisation. I argue that globalisation manifests its inherent dark side in relation to international migration due to a number of phenomena that escape traditional controls and regulations. There are at least four main components of this dark side.

The loss of political control of international migration

The first aspect of the dark side of international migration in the age of globalisation is whether or not globalisation induced migratory flows can be governed and by whom. It is quite possible, as discussed in the relevant literature, that the forces unleashed by globalisation escape governance as they are structural necessities.

In particular, the structural transformations of the global political economy lead to the structural need for populations to move both within regions and outside them. This is the consequence of three paradoxes of globalisation and their impact on the motivations for migration: the paradox of marginalisationand its impact in terms of increased extra-regional permanentmigration and brain drain; the paradox of regionalisation and its consequences in terms of intra-regional temporary migration; and the paradox of securitisationand its consequences in terms of irregular migration.

These paradoxes follow from the structural nature of globalisation and the emergence of a new global division of labour and power, and therefore the urge to migrate cannot be stopped by political entities. From this perspective, migration cannot be controlled, regulated or governed, neither by the state nor by supranational institutions. The only result political institutions can obtain from imposing regulatory regimes on international migration is to transform regular migration into irregular migration.

Moreover, because of the paradoxes of regionalisation and marginalisation, the population of the non-regionalised, marginal areas of the global political economy experience an increased incentive to migrate, thus adding two further elements to the dark side of globalisation: an increase in mass migration and brain drain.

The irregularisation of international migration and the criminalisation of migrants

The irregularisation of migration is another negative consequence of globalisation on migration. This entails the creation of new inequalities in labour markets, the rise of so called modern slavery, as well as the death toll that the process of migrating through irregular means inevitably produces.

There is a widespread consensus in the scholarly community that international migration is generally beneficial for the economic performances of host societies. International migration is considered in the literature to be a positive sum game for destination countries as it allows them to cover the gaps of their labour market, complementing the skills of the local labour force and enhancing the productivity and efficiencies of their economies.

This happens despite the fact migrants are often underemployed, have relatively lower levels of employment than the local population, and have to accept working conditions below relevant standards, which is often the case for both regular and irregular migrants. In fact, the negative aspects of globalisation induced migratory flows come from their irregularisation, which substantially contributes to the antagonisation and even criminalisation of international migrants by receiving societies.

The paradox of securitisation and increasing insecurity

The securitisation paradox, which is often justified as a way to limit global terrorism, can paradoxically fuel terrorist tendencies, not only in first-generation but also in second and third-generation migrants. The securitisation of migration policy is counterproductive as it simply results in an increase in insecurity. It does so through the irregularisation of migrants and refugees.

The irregularisation of migrants and refugees leads to dangerous journeys to reach destination countries and to the involvement of organised crime in the smuggling and exploitation of migrants. It also leads to precarious working conditions for both the local and the migrant workforce, which can facilitate modern slavery. It pushes irregular migrants into the underground economy and contributes to their related marginalisation and criminalisation by host societies, increasing the ethnification of prison populations and providing an incentive to commit crime.

Finally, it leads to growing hostility among migrant communities against receiving countries. This hostility has the potential to lead to social unrest or even terrorism. It can also act in the opposite direction by increasing the hostility of native populations to migrant communities, which leads to Islamophobia and the rise of right-wing populism.

All of this is a consequence of the paradox of securitisation within globalisation. If international migration is a structural component of globalisation, political institutions cannot stop it. The policy gap is real. The implementation of restrictive policies only produces the irregularisation of international migration. In a nutshell, increasing securitisation increases insecurity. Yet while international migrants, refugees and local citizens all stand to lose out from this process, there are also some clear winners. These are the populist and right-wing parties that have built support on their opposition to migration.

Populism and the rise of anti-migrant parties

The debate about populism and populist right-wing parties has been revamped by the recent wave of success for such parties in elections worldwide. Populism, in itself, does not need to be considered as a negative consequence of globalisation, although the literature unanimously underlines the authoritarian tendencies of populist ideologies. However, the fact that populism is often accompanied by an explicit anti-migrant, xenophobic discourse is certainly an element of the dark side of globalisation.

But what is the relationship between both the rise of populism and globalisation and between populism and anti-migrant attitudes? Are populist parties inherently anti-migrant and xenophobic or, instead, do they simply adopt these stances to attract voters? Given the delay between the start of globalisation and the electoral success of populist movements, it is questionable whether globalisation alone can be viewed as the origin of the recent populist wave. Instead, I suggest that the global economic crisis and the eurozone crisis acted as a catalyst for the contradictions of globalisation to become salient in Europe.

This is evident because in countries where globalisation did not bring economic difficulties, the populist backlash did not appear to the same extent. Both the global financial crisis and the eurozone crisis had a major impact on the economies of some countries, especially when austerity made it more difficult to compensate the losers through suitable fiscal policies.

From this perspective, the cause of populism cannot be cultural. Rather, populism must have an economic cause and the cultural manifestation of populism, and, in particular, anti-migrant feelings, is a consequence of the worsening of economic insecurity. And once in power, the anti-migrant platforms of populist parties are likely to be further entrenched, not least because the migrants that are the focus of their attention cannot vote.

For more information, see the authors new monograph, The International Political Economy of Migration in the Globalization Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, not the position of EUROPP European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Nicolas Economou / Shutterstock.com

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Migration and the 'dark side' of globalisation - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

By and large, we know what we mean by technocracy: the delegation of public authority to an elite cadre with some sort of scientific expertise, their legitimacy derived from their superior knowledge. In a technocracy, decisions can be challenged only by other experts. Everyone else must sit back and watch.

Its less clear what we mean by populism, since the term is used for so many different things. Most current definitions share the idea of a people divided and short-changed by an elite, and who come to consciousness by pushing that elite aside, replacing it with a new leadership that has a relationship of something like mystical unity with the people. Populism, on the left and the right, promises a social unity achieved through politics and the state, overcoming division by eliminating the enemies of the common people the capitalists in left populism, non-nationals of various sorts in the populism of the right. While elite rule divides the people into self-seeking factions, populism unites them, in a struggle against those who claim to know better than the masses what the masses need.

In their attempt to understand todays post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note overlooked commonalities between technocracy and populism which, they argue, allow for an unlikely synthesis between the two. Both involve the replacement of an old elite, one that is seen as technically incompetent or parasitic, with a new one that is more proficient or more responsive. Both see political legitimacy as rooted in unanimity, involving the indisputably best solutions to indisputably collective problems.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti suggest that technopopulism entails a claim to legitimacy on the part of new political actors who are seeking power after the long-drawn-out decay of postwar democracy the state-managed capitalism of the class compromise that began to unravel in the late 1970s. It promises to do away with the deadlocked factionalism, ideological divisions and party political corruption that cause the failure of contemporary politics to resolve the crises affecting contemporary societies. Technopopulism advises us to turn governance over to independent experts who are not corrupted by involvement in the politics of the past and have no personal or ideological commitment to old-style political parties. Policymaking is redefined as problem-solving, avoiding both the technical deficiencies and the social divisions associated with parliamentary democracy. As populist politics restores the unity of the people, that unity allows technocracy to serve the people by solving their problems.

Technopopulism, Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti claim, is an emerging reality in several European countries where the failings of traditional party democracy have eroded its legitimacy. They analyse five such cases. Three of them the UK under New Labour, France under Macron, and the Italian Five Star Movement are classified as pure: leaders present themselves as neither left nor right, but separate from the politics of the past. The other two cases, Podemos in Spain and the Lega in Italy, are described as hybrid: Podemos fashions itself as a far left party and the Lega as a far right one.

A detailed discussion of the five cases must be left to specialists. To explain whether and how the technopopulist tendencies described by Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti are present beyond France, the UK and Italy, it seems useful to consider the long rule of Angela Merkel, whose regime did have technopopulist traits, though what was presented as non-partisan problem-solving tended to be driven by quite traditional politics aimed at stabilising Merkels electoral base. Ultimately this project failed. All her technopopulist rhetoric achieved was to establish a temporary and fragile period of quasi-presidential personal rule under a parliamentary constitution. There is, it seems, no technopopulist cure for the decline of political parties and social institutions as mechanisms enabling political and social integration in a neoliberal society. Post-democratic politics, in whatever form, cannot pacify conflict-ridden capitalist society.

Merkel was always noted for her astonishing political flexibility you could also call it a remarkable lack of principles or ideological commitment. It was often attributed to a deep-seated pragmatism. She never seemed to feel the need to explain herself, to rationalise decisions by fitting them into a coherent political project, and made no memorable speeches expressing her feelings or beliefs in her sixteen years in office. She didnt waver from the fundamentals of the (West) German politics she inherited: membership of Nato, the EU and the EMU, alliance with France and the United States, a pursuit of open world markets for German manufacturing. But when it came to keeping her social and political bloc together, she was willing and able to live with stark contradictions that might have torn other governments apart.

When she was elected leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 2000, Merkel aspired to be the German Thatcher, arguing for the full neoliberal programme, including the abolishment of free collective bargaining and worker participation in management. But when she almost lost her first election in 2005, and had to govern through a grand coalition a coalition with Germanys other major party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) she soon discovered that she could attract or, just as usefully, demobilise middle-class SPD voters by appropriating social democratic policies. Then, in 2011, the Atomkanzlerin the nuclear energy chancellor who had invoked her authority as a physicist to tell voters that nuclear power plants were safe, reversed her position after the Fukushima disaster and decided to phase out nuclear energy, a policy of the SPD/Green government of Gerhard Schrder and Joschka Fischer that she had fought tooth and nail.

Another volte face came in the summer of 2015. To repair several PR blunders over immigration policy, to woo the Greens, and perhaps to placate the Obama administration, which was annoyed by Germanys refusal to send ground troops to Syria or Libya, Merkel opened Germanys borders to roughly one million migrants, mostly from Syria. While this met with enthusiastic support among the middle class, it caused a profound split in her party and both saved and radicalised the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which had seemed about to decline into insignificance. Without a formal mandate from the other EU states, Merkel then negotiated a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdoan, under which Turkey would receive billions of euros for preventing Syrian and other migrants crossing into Europe. Towards the end of her chancellorship, she was applauded as at once a supporter of open borders and a defender of Europe against uncontrolled immigration. She was also widely regarded as a model of environmentalism, even though her turn away from nuclear energy prolonged Germanys need to burn coal by more than a decade.

What enabled this remarkable sequence of reversals? The answer lies in both character and social structure. For the first 35 years of her life, Merkel was a well-adjusted but not particularly enthusiastic citizen of the GDR, before rising to power after reunification in the CDU, the most West German political party, in hardly more than a decade. During the 1990s, centre right parties like the CDU/CSU (the Christian Social Union is the CDUs Bavarian sister party) went through an existential crisis which many of them, such as the Italian Democrazia Cristiana, did not survive a crisis well described by Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti. Such parties tended effectively to be coalitions, with members supporting one of three political positions: capitalist modernism, anti-communism, or Catholic-patriarchal traditionalism, especially with respect to work and family. These coalitions fell apart under the pressure of the accelerated capitalist development that accompanied neoliberalism, as international competition made capitalist rationalisation spread beyond national markets and workplaces, as women took advantage of growing opportunities for paid work outside the family, and as communism finally collapsed. (A similar crisis befell most centre left parties, originally coalitions between a now shrinking working class and a growing white-collar middle class, but now placing their hopes in what they saw as an expanding non-manual and entrepreneurial labour market.) Conservative centrism became increasingly unable to project a coherent vision of a good life and a good society to which all its factions could subscribe, and conservative politics found it necessary to distance itself from old ideologies and identities, and to attempt to move to a new politics free from traditional precepts.

Merkel turned out to be a godsend to the ailing CDU. Helmut Kohl had resigned as leader after his defeat by Schrder in the 1998 federal election. Indebted to none of the CDU cliques, Merkel was profoundly indifferent to attempts to define a new programme for a party overrun by economic, social and cultural change. She realised more quickly than everyone else that the old politics had had its day and that the time had come to try something new, responding to particular events rather than taking an ideological position, oriented to the present instead of a hoped-for future, dealing with one crisis at a time, unencumbered by principle or precedent.

Eventist politics of this kind suit a society that has lost its sense of location in a historical movement from past to present, and present to future. Theres no such thing as society, the much underrated social theorist Margaret Thatcher proclaimed. There are individual men and women and there are families. Unlike Thatcher, Merkel never lectured her public. Rather than demanding that people change their lives get on their bikes, as Thatchers minister Norman Tebbit put it she made the state seem like a service company, ready to fix peoples problems so that they could continue to live as they pleased. This helped to counter a perception of the world as fundamentally incoherent. No large plan, no holistic approach can be of help in such a world, only fast and flexible responses to dangers as they arise, carried out by an experienced leader with a strong capacity for improvisation.

Can this be considered technopopulism? In a sense it can. For the new conservatism, crises arise from disorder, not from a wrong order, and their handling should be entrusted to technicians in command of special knowledge, whether scientific or magical, or both (they are hard to distinguish for the political consumer). Merkel never claimed to be an economist, or a lawyer, or an expert in foreign policy or military strategy. She did, however, have herself described by her communications team, and sometimes described herself, as privy to knowledge of a special kind: that of a scientist trained to solve problems by analysing them from the desired outcome backwards.

In this way, Merkel presented herself as the embodiment of the hard-to-translate German concept of Sachlichkeit. The closest English equivalents are objectivity and matter-of-factness, to the extent that they imply an emotional detachment from the problem at hand, and a concentration on its specific demands and internal logic. But, looking at Merkels years in office, its clear that her dominant concern wasnt with finding the optimal solutions to specific issues, but with the age-old basics of governance: the building and maintenance of a sustainable governing majority a technical approach, yes, that addressed problems as they arose, but which saw them as problems of politics rather than policy. Post-ideological, but certainly not post-political.

When Merkel turned away from nuclear energy, for example, what she was looking for was not a safer method of energy generation but a stable government majority. It wasnt physics that carried the day in 2011, but Merkels now favourite science, polling, which showed that the Germans had had it with nuclear energy. The end she had in mind was not public safety but political realignment: a durable coalition with the Greens. They would replace not just the liberal Free Democratic Party (FPD), which was too suspicious of Merkels social democratic mimicry and too headstrong in foreign affairs, but also the SPD, which as a formerly socialist party must have seemed unreliable to this former citizen of the GDR and in any case was too big to be a sufficiently compliant partner. It was for a similar reason that Merkel, eager to shed her ice queen image in parts of the German press, allowed the refugees to enter Germany in 2015.

If we accept that this is a version of technocracy, was there also an element of populism? Passionate appeals to the German people were alien to Merkel, who seems always to have been keenly aware of the pitfalls of German history for German politics and the countrys reputation abroad. Germany and the German people were hers only to the extent that they followed her; in an hour-long audience she gave to her favourite television journalist during the open border crisis she said: If we now have to apologise for showing a friendly face in an emergency, then this is not my country. The populus in Merkels politics was not a German but a European one, though one governed and structured as much as possible along German lines, through the single market and, in particular, the EMU. Under Merkel, it was the Europe of the EU that was the imagined community of German politics, a nation in the making, forging the peoples of Europe into an ever closer union a community without conflict and contradictions governed expertly by a well-meaning elite.

In the German collective consciousness, Europe has long taken the place of Germany, which is seen as an outdated and outgrown political shell, an embarrassing historical legacy. Populist appeals to the German people are rarely made in Germany, except of course by the AfD, while Europe is frequently invoked as both the ultimate objective and the legitimate location of (post-)German (post-)national policy. Merkel herself may have preferred Europe for more than just historical reasons. The kind of political decision-making she favours closely resembles that characteristic of the EU: decontextualized, event-driven, legitimised by expert opinion rather than agreed through public debate and negotiation, with deep structural problems treated as superficial political ones. The politics of Sachlichkeit allow potentially democratic nation-states to be replaced by a technocratic superstate, and class conflict to be replaced by international macroeconomic management.

Merkels record, and that of her brand of technopopulism, was far from impressive when it mattered most to her. In three of the four elections in which she stood as party leader (2005, 2009 and 2017), the CDU/CSU did worse than it had at the previous election; its vote also declined in 2021. Only in 2013 did the CDU vote go up, from 33.8 per cent to 41.5 per cent. Four years later, it was down to 32.9 per cent, and four years after that to 24.1 per cent. If the hidden agenda of Merkels technopopulism was to establish a new bourgeois centre, extending the CDU/CSU vote by adding recruits from the Greens, it failed spectacularly. In 2009 Merkel broke with her marriage of convenience with the SPD to form a government with the liberal FDP, which had had its best ever election result, winning 14.5 per cent of the vote. Marginalised and humiliated by Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schuble, who came to see the FDP as competing for rather than adding to their voter base, the FDP was voted out of the Bundestag four years later, winning less than 5 per cent of the vote. The Fukushima incident which took place towards the middle of Merkels second term, in March 2011 then offered an ideal opportunity for reorganising the political centre. Merkels Energiewende (energy turn) paid off in the 2013 election. But while the SPD vote also increased (though only by 2.7 per cent), the Green vote dropped, from 10.7 to 8.4 per cent, with Merkel getting almost all the credit for a policy change that was high on the Green agenda. As a result of all this, Merkel found herself forced into another grand coalition.

Her next opportunity to rebuild Germanys political centre came in 2015, with the opening of Germanys borders, to the applause of German Willkommenskultur. This, too, backfired. Two years later, in 2017, the CDU/CSU and the SPD vote dropped dramatically, while the Greens stagnated. The FDP, which had kept silent in 2015, rebounded, and the AfD, fiercely opposed to immigration in any form, entered the Bundestag for the first time at 12.6 per cent. Merkels overture to the Greens had caused her party to do badly enough that the coalition for the sake of which she had made this move was once again impossible. When she tried to put together a three-party coalition by adding the FDP, its leaders remembered how she had treated them before and bowed out at the last minute. It was only after heavy pressure from the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an SPD foreign minister in an earlier grand coalition, that the SPD could be convinced to join a government under Merkel for the third time.

The 2017 election was the beginning of the end for Merkel. When the CDU lost heavily in a Land election in 2018, it allowed her to continue as chancellor until the 2021 election only if she resigned as party chair. In 2021 the CDU/CSU ended up on 24.1 per cent while the Greens won a record 14.8 per cent, but this, once again, wasnt enough to make up for the CDU/CSUs losses. The AfD vote remained stable, as did the FDPs. The SPD vote went up by 5.2 per cent, leaving it 1.6 percentage points ahead of the CDU/CSU, and enabling its candidate, Olaf Scholz, Merkels sitting finance minister, to become chancellor in a three-party government with the Greens and the FDP.

Merkels unhappy ending shows that technopopulism is not necessarily any more durable than old-fashioned centrist conservatism. Realising that the centrism of the postwar era was collapsing, Merkel had been grooming the Greens as a next-generation bourgeois centre party, but she couldnt overcome the logic of popular politics. There is no insurance in politics against bad luck, unanticipated side effects, or strategic miscalculation. Technopopulism seems to have a succession problem and a smooth succession is essential to the stability of a regime. Armin Laschet, the candidate for chancellor on whom the CDU/CSU agreed after a long battle, had nothing in his favour other than his loyalty to her and his promise to be exactly the same kind of leader. Anything else would have drawn her ire, as her initial favourite, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, could confirm, and would also have caused still more divisions inside the party. Even if we ignore the possibility that some centrist voters may have wanted at least a degree of change, Laschet had no way of proving himself. Without being chancellor, he couldnt demonstrate the problem-solving pragmatism, the skills of technopopulist post-democratic leadership, that had been the hallmark of Merkels rule, or at least its public faade. The only person who could do this at all was Scholz, who made a point during the campaign of presenting himself to the voters as Merkels legitimate heir, even adopting some of her characteristic hand gestures.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti place their hope for a restoration of democracy on the rebuilding of political parties as intermediaries between particular and general social interests. Here, the book falls short in a number of respects, raising the question, rarely discussed among social scientists, of whether pointing out a problem necessarily creates the obligation to suggest a solution, however flimsy. Not every problem can be fixed.

Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti are remarkably selective about the institutions that need to be rebuilt to enable a return from technopopulism to democracy. Before the victory of neoliberalism, it was taken for granted that in order to resolve the differences between competing interests, capitalist democracy required not just a functioning party and parliamentary system but also a system that made room for negotiation between employers and workers. There was wide acceptance of the idea that, in a capitalist political economy, trade unions in whatever form, varying from country to country could provide what the Norwegian political scientist Stein Rokkan called a second tier of government, one that recognised and dealt with the class conflict between capital and labour in a way party democracy could not.

Recently, democratic theory has focused almost exclusively on the state, neglecting industrial democracy. The assumption is that society-wide consensus will come about through rational discourse, as though class interests can be adjudicated by means of public debate and some notion of shared values. Trade unionism and collectivism are entirely excluded from the neoliberal understanding of the political economy. This, perversely, allows current democratic theory to do without a concept of capitalism, trivialising if not altogether excluding the fundamental conflict between those creating and those owning the capital on whose profitable deployment the fate of a capitalist society depends. The aim of state democracy, as contemporary theorists see it, is to achieve the normative unity of a classless society of equals. They imagine the formation through public debate of a consensus on the just distribution of something whose distribution cannot by its nature be just. Settlements between ultimately incompatible class interests under capitalism must come about through conflict, even if that conflict is institutionally contained by bargaining between unequals, not reasoning among equals. Rescuing democracy from technopopulist distortion without conceiving it as democracy-in-opposition-to-capitalism looks like a fairly hopeless endeavour.

This conception of a state democracy that produces normative unity is closer to populism, especially statist right-wing populism, than it may seem. Indeed, there are striking affinities between the Habermasian liberal image of politics as a way of overcoming dissent through public argument and the populist utopia of a people united in and by their belief in the collective values embodied in the constitution of the state. The desired result differs sharply middle-class v. plebeian political rule but what these conceptions have in common is that both fail to allow for the relentless obstruction and disruption of social and political integration that is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. Democratic theory without a theory of class conflict pretends that there can be normative unity despite material disunity a normative unity that is more than the manufactured consent described by Noam Chomsky.

Quite apart from Bickerton and Invernizzi Accettis implicit separation of political science from political economy, there seems to be a good deal of wishful thinking behind their call for a return to party democracy. While the disintegration of postwar party systems in the 1990s may have contributed to the rise of technopopulism, it didnt happen out of the blue, but was caused by the rapid progress of capitalist modernisation, which blew apart the precarious coalitions both within and between the centre parties that kept postwar democratic capitalism together. Capitalism, indeed turbocapitalism, is still around, and if a new kind of party system is to take over the mediating functions of its predecessor, the least one would expect is that it would reflect the disruptions that capitalist progress is bound to inflict on the societies it revolutionises.

Capitalism produces winners and losers, and democracy under capitalism must offer the losers a chance to make up through politics something of what they have to yield to the market to correct market justice through something like social justice. This requires a political space that provides a society not only with alternatives to argue about, but with a real choice between them. If that space is too narrow or restrictive, politics is likely to be diverted to issues of moral rectitude about which one cannot disagree without bringing into question peoples right to exist in society. This, too, is something that populism and left liberalism seem to have in common.

It is important to remember that almost no such political space exists for EU member states, which may be the most important reason that European politics, more than any national politics, tries to be populist and technocratic at the same time. Under the single market, debates on limits to the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital are pointless. The treaties between member states preclude any such limits and are enforced by a supranational court against whose rulings there is no recourse. If a country is also a member of the EMU, its fiscal policies have to observe strict guidelines and its yearly budgets must be inspected. Again, all this is excluded from public debate because it has already been decided by the treaties, which rule out any control of capital movements even across the external borders of the EU itself.

In the politics of a rapidly modernising capitalist society, while progress may be sought through Schumpeterian creative destruction of modes of production and ways of life, tradition may call for paternalistic protection and socialistic solidarity. This may cause a recombination of the factions of the sunken party systems of the postwar era: capitalist modernisers and the former working class, who now make up a new, often green middle class, on the one hand, and the old working class, the new precariat and cultural protectionists suspicious of modernisation, on the other. Bringing about this realignment may appear easier than it really is. Merkels technopopulism was a front behind which she tried to build a political bloc in which a renewed conservative party would play a dominant role a conservatism capable of getting a new bourgeois progressivism to join it around a policy of, as Merkel once put it, market-conforming democracy. But this required credible ideological content, which didnt materialise, presumably because a marriage of conservatism, turbocapitalism and democracy is so difficult to conceive.

In a growing number of countries, the resulting political void is increasingly filled by a new left, which disguises its own problem of coalition-building between economic globalism and national social protection behind public soul-searching for moral deficiencies in a permanent cultural revolution. The public sphere of capitalist democracies today tends to be moralised in a way that obstructs the formation of collective interests, which are replaced by safe symbolic spaces for self-defined rights-bearing minorities. Radical politics becomes reduced to struggles, often adjudicated by the courts, by ever smaller groups for control over their symbolic representation. Instead of coalition-building and majority-formation, postmodern politics of this sort gives rise to social fragmentation.

Merkels project of building a new conservative-progressive centre for German politics that would politically neutralise the class-conflicted core of capitalist society was always bound to fail. More than anything else, it failed because she was unable to keep the right the reactionary answer to turbocapitalist modernisation on her side, as she lost up to 10 per cent of the electorate to the AfD, a party she had to declare untouchable in order to keep her constituency together. But all her new political formula had to offer was technical competence, the appearance of Sachlichkeit vested in her as a person. It wasnt enough.

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