The Digger

  The War on Populism: The Final Act So, it appears the  War on Populism  is building toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color revolution, and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters … you couldn’t really ask for much more. OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won’t spoil our viewing experience. The fun isn’t in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what’s going to happen. The fun is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or “the moderate rebels,” or the GloboCap “Resistance,” take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or whatever. The show-runners at GloboCap und...

Morsels: Published on  Jan, 27, 2019  :  The fight for democracy in the deep countryside Nor is this support simply confined to what could be loosely termed working class people. Support, at least in my area, covers everyone, working and middle class people alike. It includes for instance the woman PA for a managing director of quite a big company; a woman who, despite having worked at the company for 16 years, is still being paid what is colloquially referred to as the ‘smic’, the minimum wage. Indeed almost all the people around here are paid the bare ‘smic’ no matter what their qualifications, something true of 80% of provincial France. Another woman described as basically running a large storage facility, performing all admin, doing the accounts is, despite her university degree, similarly only earning ‘smic’. For this middle class social capital she travels almost two hours a day. All complain constantly about taxes; uniformly they claim to have nothing lef...

Left populism vs. insipid pluralism Morsels: SINCE DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY, a steady stream of concern pieces has appeared across the national press: “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” “An Erosion of Democratic Norms in America.” “Will Democracy Survive Trump’s Populism? Latin America May Tell Us.” “Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy.” “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’” The worry is obvious: democracy is under threat. Moving from headline to text, however, one perceives a shift. The basic meaning of democracy — the rule of the people, or popular sovereignty — is nowhere to be found. Instead, democracy appears to refer to a series of institutions and norms, not all of them obviously democratic. In the New York Times, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write that Trump’s flagrant rejection of “partisan self-restraint and fair play” po...

A plea for liberal nationalism ignores what it has looked like in practice. Morsels:  Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard who has emerged as a kind of expert on the vogueish “crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism” (he has also written for this magazine), has hit upon what he believes is a novel idea for achieving “a kind of society for which there is no clear precedent”—that is, a liberal democracy in a multiethnic country that was for a long time either monoethnic or subject to a racial hierarchy. In his new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, the executive director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s “Renewing the Centre team” argues that a revitalized liberalism is the answer. [...] Mounk’s sociological realism should not be confused with critique. His treatise is inspired neither by anti-elite animus nor the radical promise of democracy. It is instead a view from above, or perhaps something lik...

Excerpts: This text deals with strategy, but strategy cannot be seen separate from people and their histories and actions. SYRIZA has always been an uneasy conglomerate of groups of many political persuasions, but ever since it came to power in January 2015, until its capitulation seven months later, two main fractions fought a fierce fight. On one side, there was the heterogeneous left, which wanted to make good on the electoral promise (the Thessaloniki program): there was going to be no austerity any longer, Greece would negotiate a debt write off and if the Troika pushed the country to the brink, the group advocated leaving the euro zone. The leadership, on the other side, also wanted to end austerity. But under no condition was it willing to exit the euro zone. As Lapavitsas explains, the Syriza leadership convinced itself that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of financial and political unrest. The mastermind of this strategy was Yanis...

Excerpts: Inequality is an issue everywhere. Corporate profits have never been higher, labor’s share of national income has almost never been lower, and inflation has been replaced by deflation. Is there a set of economic ideas, a new economic paradigm that can help to reverse this situation? I do not think that it is helpful to think in terms of paradigms. Paradigms imply giant interconnected sets of ideas where everything presents itself neatly, and you choose between clear options. Think about neo-nationalism. We’ve just mentioned that there are two strains. According to the country you look at, you may find even more strains. Let’s take the case of Sweden. Why are the Swedish extreme right doing so well? To me the most convincing explanation is not immigration, because that does not really move that much in the polls. And it is certainly not inequality because Sweden is still one of the most equal societies on the planet. The answer has to do with the fact that for many yea...

Excerpts: What exactly  is  the EU and what is the effect of the EU on our national politics and economics? These questions — the most important ones facing the British Left in 2018 — have received little serious treatment across the political spectrum since the referendum. Costas Lapavitsas’ book,  The Left Case Against the EU  (Polity, 2018; ISBN: 9781509531066; 179pp.), addresses this gap by offering a direct class analysis of the European Union. It points to a clear and unequivocal conclusion: anyone on the Left has to be foursquare against the EU. [...] Almost the entirety of the British “Left”, by which I mean many Labour-supporting Remainers, is deeply Europhile. Their support for the EU, often so equivocal and hesitant before the Referendum, has deepened and hardened. They make a series of unforgivable analytical errors in their analysis of the EU and of Brexit. They frequently equate the EU with Europe. The slogan “for Europe, against the EU” is often...

"Populism is widely misunderstood. It can be found on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It’s not about how liberal or conservative you are. It’s about the failure of the system to provide economic and social security for a large part of the population." Excerpt: Populists today object to the status quo, to being ruled by elites, to what they see as a rogue establishment, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, that’s no longer accountable to the general public. They’re right about that, but otherwise they have little understanding of how this came to be, how political and economic power came to be concentrated, at their expense, in very few, mostly unaccountable, hands. [...] These old-time American populists were battling the powerful trusts, or monopolies, that came to dominate the United States economy after the Civil War. In key infrastructure areas like transportation and energy the monopolies were able to set exorbitant rates for servic...

Yellow Vests, Italian Budget  Battles & Silent Labor Unions   "While organized labor restrains itself, both right- and left-wing populists take the helm on EU on economic issues, many claiming they are not anti-European as such, but merely determined to stop the austerity policies that have done so much harm to the population." Excerpts: " Since mid-September, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has been battling with Italy over its budget.  The populist government in Rome—led by the  Five-Star Movement , orM5S, and the  League —have decided to stimulate the economy by giving money to the poor, lowering taxes and increasing public investment. With an assist from financial markets that are penalizing Italian government bonds, the Commission has been threatening an “excessive deficit procedure” if Italy doesn’t reduce spending and resume measures to balance its budget. In theory this austerity policy will make the country more sta...