Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

Sweeping Win for Cameron in Britain: Conservative Party Secures Majority

Netanyahu’s new government is more right, more religious than last

Liberal Party in charge in Australia, Conservative Party in Canada.

Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

And if so, why?

I don't think so. The United States has a president, who, for all that leftists dislike him, is probably the most left-wing President since the 1970s. In England, the Conservative majority will be smaller than the center-right Conservative-LD coalition that was in charge before, and my sense is that the massive swing from Scottish Labour to SNP is in no way a move to the right. In Canada, NDP just took over one of the most conservative provinces in the country, and Liberals are polling way better than they were back in 2011 when Harper won his current majority; I don't think people are projecting he'll keep that majority in the upcoming election. I don't know much about Australia or France.

I don't think so either. Bibi's coalition not likely to last long, US drifting towards the left afaict. Europe's rightward drift seems largely driven by xenophobia (always with the petty regionalism/nationalism over there) which is sad to watch.

I don't think Canada is more right-wing that it was 10 or 20 years ago. It's just that the more left-leaning vote is split between two parties. Also the Liberals have had terrible leadership in the last decade or so.

The conservatives have been pretty good at keeping everyone together and keeping internal dissent to a minimum.

based on comments in this thread obv the answer is "hell yes"

XP xenophobia of Scots towards the english, maybe

other answer is "because the further right we go the further right people think of as 'left wing'"

Renzi's performance in the Euro elections seemed significant. Huge victory for pro-austerity leader who was thought to be much more divisive. It's mostly fiscal conservatism on the rise in Europe. Despite the growth of the far right the mainstream tends to be more socially liberal I think.

dont forget Greece lol

I guess if you look at the actual governments in place, they are more right-wing, but that feels more like the left not getting their shit together rather than the actual people being more conservative. I don't know. We probably don't have the best systems for electing governments.

XP xenophobia of Scots towards the english, maybe

You're making the assumption that people who vote SNP are nationalists... for a start.

just playing with the yanks tom

Suspected as much, but I remember them having difficulty understanding the concept to left wing nationalists during the referendum, bless 'em.

concept of

theyre some craic hey

The United States has a president, who, for all that leftists dislike him, is probably the most left-wing President since the 1970s

lol, picked that decade due to that anarchist Jimmy Carter? (who ruled out reparations to Vietnam because "the destruction was mutual")

the last liberal POTUS was a man named Lyndon Johnson.

both houses of congress and most of the state houses in the u.s. are controlled by a class of republicans who are probably the most right-wing major faction in america since the southern democrats of the antebellum era. i think the u.s. actually is drifting to the left in a lot of ways, but it's not always perceptible in our elections.

it seems hard to dispute that obama's the most progressive president since johnson, his foreign policy's certainly better.

yeah idk if electorates are drifting right as much as right-wing oligarchs are just tightening their reigns of power

xp

xp

well that's a high raw body count to match even when you bomb 7 Muslim countries

and have prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the other presidents in history

and

"progressive" sure is a versatile word is all im sayin'

I don't think Canada is more right-wing that it was 10 or 20 years ago. It's just that the more left-leaning vote is split between two parties.

Why do people always say this? The NDP has been around since 1961; before it, the CCF was winning seats in federal elections since 1935. The Liberals still managed to thoroughly dominate Canada in the 20th century, even with a single 'united' PC or Conservative party until the 90s.

In terms of economic policy, I still think the Liberals of the 90s were at least as right-wing as any other post-war federal government. I actually feel like the mood is shifting left these days (which the AB election demonstrates).

I specified "10 or 20 years" specifically because I didn't really follow politics before that. I think the fact that there were multiple right-wing parties in the 90s is a pretty significant reason as to why the Liberals were able to win elections with such large majorities back then.

Here in Quebec it definitely feels like we have shifted to the right. Every successive Liberal leader has been more right-wing than his predecessor.

The West is definitely rightward leaning. The US left is more or less non-existent, beholden to the same corporate interests as the right. They dangle civil rights issues like gay marriage as a carrot to voters, because they know without those issues, nothing much separates their war-and-banks-driven governmental style from the right's. The hope that Obama will close gitmo is certainly worth more monetarily than him actually closing it down.

The question is: is this a recent development or a general tendency of US representative democracy? I suppose it began as representing mainly the interests of those who could legally vote (white male landowners/oligarchs), which you could say is a rightward position. Since then women have been granted the vote and minorities as well, but is their vote worth the same as the oligarchs that have always monopolized representation? No way in hell.

Perhaps in a way we have become more socially liberal, but the systems of control and oppression are working against that development in a way that greatly negates it. Corporate personhood imo continues to devalue "free speech" and the spits at the virtue of representative democracy.

Going by Wiki numbers, the combined popular vote of the Reform and PC parties was still less than the Liberals' share of the popular vote in the 93 and 97 elections. The combined total of the Alliance's and PCs' share of the popular vote in 2000 was just under the Liberals' share and was well under the combined total of the Liberals and NDP. (I also doubt that all PC voters would have chosen the Alliance over the Liberals if they had to choose. Clark himself preferred the Liberals.) King's, St. Laurent's, Pearson's, and Pierre Trudeau's Liberals all managed to win elections (after elections) despite facing left-wing competition.

I get resentful about 'vote-splitting' arguments for a few reasons but especially because I feel that they are usually made by Liberals to unfairly marginalize/minimize/accuse any progressive alternative.

The Liberals lost in 2006 because they were corrupt, arrogant, and entitled. They haven't managed to convince the voting public since then.

for the record, I agree with you re: vote-splitting. I don't want any kind of NDP/Liberals merger and will most likely vote NDP in the next election.

Still, I think it's difficult to argue that the Conservatives being the only viable party right of center doesn't benefit them enormously, allowing them to form majority governments despite not being able to get beyond 40% support.

The real problem is a lack of any kind of proportional representation.

I don't have the nuanced take on what is left wing, probably a bit dated & old fashioned. Indiscriminately killing civilians with drones and police does throw up some red flags though

most nuanced take

It is all shifted right in the context of most other Western countries.

it seems hard to dispute that obama's the most progressive president since johnson

Obama Lashes Out at Liberal Foes of Pacific Trade Deal
By PETER BAKER 3:07 PM ET
At Nike headquarters in Oregon, the president lashed out at critics within his own party, accusing Democrats of deliberately distorting the impact of the trade agreement he is negotiating with Asia.

i didn't think it'd be terribly controversial to say that obama was more progressive than carter or clinton. but yes i'm aware that the guy isn't bernie sanders.

you are also aware some people never get tired of criticizing him

I don't think the left's popularity is waning. It's just that their appeal is becoming more selective.

http://i.imgur.com/OGFBhT3.jpg

Here in Quebec it definitely feels like we have shifted to the right. Every successive Liberal leader has been more right-wing than his predecessor.

― silverfish, Friday, May 8, 2015 2:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not only that, but like in many places across the West, our de facto left wing party has slowly and steadily become right wing.

love the passive voice thread question

plz put the q in active voice for me

present progressive, not passive

de facto left wing party

Had sort of a hollow lol when I realized that this probably refers to the PQ.

h/t the donald trump thread

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_MxkTUjnGeBaoavzdNapdX_UqkI=/1600x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4082854/Figure_7_.0.png

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by "shift in the percentage replying..." -- e.g. if 1000 respondents were surveyed from the United States in 1995 and 50 said "good or very good" then, does the chart mean that the number/1000 increased to 55 in 2014, or does it mean it increased to 150?

i.e. are we talking percent change or percentage point change?

the way i understand it, if in 1955 20% said army rule is good, and then in 2015 30% said so, there would be an increase of 10%? does that make sense?

btw i think the premise of this thread is true more than ever right now.

I don't think there's an overall rightward drift in the US. I do think there's a rightward drift on the right.

xp that makes sense, as long as that's what vox means

btw i think the premise of this thread is true more than ever right now.

― Mordy

I dunno. hard to say. to play devil's advocate:

likelihood is the United States will elect a democrat next year for the third election in a row.

Canada just voted out the conservatives in an election where the conservatives purposefully used wedge issues and stoked islamophobia as a vote-winning tactic.

The ruling party the conservative PP in Spain failed to return a majority in the election on Sunday.

I do think there's a rightward drift on the right.

^^^this

otoh france has moved so far to the right that the socialists had to throw their support behind the republicans to keep the national front out of power

terrorist attacks will do that

It's also important not to treat the opinions of the youngest voters as the future, necessarily, because people's opinions can tend to moderate as they age.

"moderate"

I do think that we've seen an increase in a kind of hyper-emotional style of politics that drives people away from grudgingly settling on the middle. I think the internet and social media actually have begun to break up the hold that mainstream news channels and the sensible-sounding center had on US politics, with both good and bad effects. I think Sanders' substantial support is evidence of that every bit as much as Trump's -- it has to be the internet and social media that have allowed Sanders to raise the kind of funds he has from small donors while being given little attention in old guard press and tv outlets.

I think as far as a worldwide rightward drift, though, that was actually happening from the 80s through 00's and now may have pulled back a bit. Maybe not in every country, but in the US and much of Europe (in spite of surges in right-wing nationalism), I think so. Obviously Israel has gone further right, maybe India has.

The responses on the army-rule question are not necessarily comparable between countries -- a heavily destabilized country like Iraq might have good reasons for seeing army rule as an alternative beyond any "rightward drift"

India's internal politics don't track much with other countries afaict, lot of unique competing interests and circumstances there

re France our republicans are to the left of your American republicans, tbh the Front Nationale is to the left of your republicans

sort of impressive india has never been under military rule

in the United States there was a definite rightwards shift in center-left coalitions starting in the late seventies and peaking in the presidency of Bill Clinton.

i don't know if this phenomenon has as much to do with ideology as much as it has to do with structural changes in capitalism

xxp 1858–1947

fwiw i was arguing w my dad a month ago and he called me a progressive, which was weird, cos that's maybe the first time in my entire life anyone, let alone him, has said that. i blame Trump and Facebook.

you should tell your dad that you're a La Follette Republican

We all need to reach out to our Muslim family and friends, imo

Maybe that's condescending? I hate this shit. My irl friends (yes I have a few) know how I feel.

bump.

fingers crossed i don't have to bump this thread again in nov.

while neocons like Kagan fundraise for Clinton, the more reliable War Pig.

stfu dumbass

lol, timely revive :(

while neocons like Kagan fundraise for Clinton, the more reliable War Pig.

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius), Friday, June 24, 2016 9:19 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's really remarkable how human-like this experiment in artificial intelligence is. it's almost as if a real person is up around the clock, posting the same ideas every ten minutes, couched in slightly different language, metaphors, and invective. whoever programmed this bot deserves more attention than she is getting.

the same like 3 people bop in to respond to every single morbs post and you're one of them so who's the bot here

http://www.theycallmedaymz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/whostheboss.jpg

to answer the q idk if it's an overall drift but the right we've known is being eaten alive by the right we thought was dead

big french election next year too. marie le pen looking pretty smug today.

the same like 3 people bop in to respond to every single morbs post and you're one of them so who's the bot here

― goole, Friday, June 24, 2016 11:00 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i happen to read many of the politics threads, and morbs happens to post 400 times an hour in those, 90% of his posts variations on the same thing. sorry if once in a while i mock him for it. makes it every slightly more bearable, in the absence of a reliable post filter.

sorry we're all engaging in hyperbole here. i don't respond to "every single" morbs post (that would be several full-time jobs) and he doesn't post "400 times an hour."

Marine Le Pen's FN can count on 25% of voters but it's hard to see them breaking out beyond that.

I have a friend active in Mélenchon's Parti de Gauche who is hosting a Brexit party tonight. They're working toward a Frexit too, and they may be able to pick up 10-ish% of the vote next year.

So if there were to be an alliance of the Eurosceptic Left and the Right, it would at any rate have more of a voice in the legislature than French euroscepticism has had to date. But I don't see them winning the presidency.

quite intrigued to know what a melenchonian socialist brexit party ends up looking like

marine le pen makes think ivanka trump is gonna run for some sort of office after her dad self immolates in november

http://www.wsj.com/articles/spain-votes-in-election-rerun-1466930740

Is Ivanka, deep down, a fascist? Xp

sure why not

This is primarily about Eastern Europe but is relevant and interesting:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/lee-kuan-yew-legacy-116317

bump

maybe the accelerationists were right after all and this is good news

even in worst case scenario countries have survived much worse

This is worst than right wing drift, it is embracing sheer objective ignorance.

guess I better bookmark this again as well

he's for sure more shit than most right-wingers but imagine how freaked the fuck out france is gonna be next may

let's talk worst case scenario for a few minutes --

in terms of major geopolitical/domestic crisis this will not be as bad as ww2 or the civil war - much more tumultuous, likely far more death and misery at those times. domestic is not going to be great. it's hard to imagine they actually roll back roe v wade but that would obviously be simply terrible. economy likely going to take a major hit almost immediately. europe should probably be concerned about the NATO threats - maybe nat sec industry can impress on trump importance of backing agreements there and in asia. domestic light fascism - ramping up militerization of police - obv major problem. climate change probably fucked but as i constantly hear we're already absolutely fucked so maybe not a huge sea change there.

us AG will OK voter suppression and no democrat will win nationally again

very seriously going to renew my passport and get passports for my kids within the next few weeks depending on what happens tonight. i'm obviously going to wait and see before making any drastic decisions bc there's a range of misery within which it might be worth staying. like if emboldened white supremacists start bombing synagogues that'll probably be my cue - and i imagine v similar warning signs for other minorities who have seen something dark + potentially genocidal lurking behind trump's rhetoric and coalition

I can think of some particular - uh let's call them territories - that Bibi would love to settle 3,000,000 new US olim I'm just saying.

lol

definitely time to renew passports, I have mine but my wife's is expired I think

glad i have mine. i might be moving to d.c. though? what the fuck

i'm so scared right now

France will likely elect a right winger in May but it'll probably be Juppé, not Le Pen.

conservatives not losing grip in england any time soon. i believe in the thesis statement of this thread more than ever.

Feeling a brand new kind of fear and despair this morning

i feel scared

i think we live a very dangerous moment and i don't know if this post-ww2 period of relative equilibrium is going to hold much longer. i hope i'm just being hyperbolic but it seems like we're heading towards some scary times. what i learnt from my great-grandparents was that the bonds of society are tenuous and easily frayed and that when they collapse they can explode in danger + violence. i hope we get through the next few years + are able to minimize what could surely be the worst yet to come.

We've been pretty lucky to have 7 decades of relative peacefulness. This, along with other election results this year, just really shows people don't really give a fuck anymore, because they don't think the consequences will be that bad...

Rome took like 10-15 terrible rulers before it really hit the shitter iirc

i think there will be a lot of hyperbole in the next few days, or accusations of hyperbole and emotional showboating anyway. but a candidate who explicitly positioned himself as refusing to be bound by democratic process (or basic respect for human rights) is about to become Commander-in-Chief of the US military. not sure there's enough hyperbole to cover that.

I'm fairly certain we're not facing Syria or Venezeula and we're not facing 1938 Europe or 1860 America. Which isn't to say things don't look terribly bleak but it does make sense to put it into some context.

the damage will likely not be so dramatic or immediate, sure. but i have a real feeling of not knowing how far this will go or where it can end

I'm more concerned about the Frank Gaffney / Peter Thiel dream team whispering in his ear than Trump himself. I'm not sure this will be a definitive break from GWB, just a horrible magnification of its worst excesses. And we're still dealing with the fallout from the first time around.

The only positive recently has been Polish women showing that if you withdraw your labour from the market, you can stymie parts of a regressive platform. Six million people going on strike forced the government to shelve even more restrictive abortion laws. That kind of tactic might have a value in the US and UK over the next few years.

The only positive recently has been Polish women showing that if you withdraw your labour from the market, you can stymie parts of a regressive platform. Six million people going on strike forced the government to shelve even more restrictive abortion laws. That kind of tactic might have a value in the US and UK over the next few years.

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Wednesday, November 9, 2016 2:04 AM (four seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry if people couldn't be arsed to vote in large numbers against Trump why would they care for such tactics? Life in Williamsburg and in Silicon Valley will continue to be pretty great I'm certain.

People did vote in fairly large numbers against Trump, Brexit, PiS, etc, but not large enough to stop them. The common theme with all of them is that they had enough of the public vote to win but (and I think this will be true of Trump as well) a majority of economically active people voted the other way. They have a power over and above their vote. I don't think it will do much to stop the wider economic programme or foreign policy catastrophes but on single issues it might be effective.

if i thought there were techno-puppeteers whispering into trump's ears that would almost make me feel a little better but i don't think he plans to listen to anyone. i hope ppl in nat sec can prevail on him to not withdraw from the world stage, or that if he does that putin at least shows some resistance. annexing south ossetia we can probably live with. all of ukraine? moldova? one thing that concerns/interests me is that it seems like now, maybe more than ever before in history, there is zero moral authority in the world. if i were a dictator or a fascist or i had a neighbor whose land i coveted or an ethnic group that i thought it would be convenient to ethnically cleanse, this seems like the perfect time to do it. who is going to stop you?

not sure we should hope the type of nat sec people who are likely to have his ear see their suggestions prevail

you want to strike a balance but i'd like some guys in there who are maybe like "hey let's not detonate any tactical nukes in the field that seems like a bad idea" or "you know that torture thing didn't work out too great last time maybe let's avoid that one" or "hey let's just reassure japan and the saudis and maybe dissuade them from getting nukes"

wonder how bibi feels right now. probably nervous. bennett is gonna be knocking on his door in a few minutes asking when they can start annexing area C.

Yglesias bad a sad tweet about the difference between trump and brexit is that brexit at least won a majority

I strongly suspect that someone will sit him down over the next few days and remind him how many of his colleagues depend on the military industrial complex for their seats. The projection of American power is unlikely to go anywhere. How that power is expressed is anyone's guess but I suppose I can forget about doing any business with Iran over the next four years.

ARPAIO OUT

http://www.jpost.com/US-Elections/Donald-Trump/Likud-MKs-react-to-Trumps-victory-in-US-Presidential-Election-472088

After congratulating President-elect Donald Trump, and thanking defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for her friendship to Israel, Bayit Yehudi chairman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett said "the era of a Palestinian state is over."

"Trump's victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause. This is the position of the President-elect, as written in his platform, and it should be our policy, plain and simple," he wrote.

this wolfgang munchau bit has also been doing the rounds

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwzzYmNXEAAN6M8.jpg

The world's most powerful person who is neither an authoritarian nor a nutjob is, as of this week, Angela Merkel. This is not good news.

yeah that is very sobering.

Huntington in 2004

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cw1QafgXgAEI_MG.jpg:large

In the Netherlands Wilders obv gloating about Trump's victory, calling it "another boost in the worldwide patriotic spring". We've elections in March next year. That will be fun :-/

People will fight really hard to hold onto what they have, whatever shitty thing it is.

The Netherlands got overrun by its more powerful neighbor the last time patriotic nationalism got up a big head of steam in Europe.

It's so weird this worldwide international nationalism right I feel like we've barely touched on it but it's obv very real. Is it comparable to Germany Japan and Italy or is this some weird new thing? What do Russian patriots and US patriots and French patriots really have in common? It's really international white supremacism isn't t?

Describing anything this complex as 'just' anything does not feel particularly productive.

Is it comparable to Germany Japan and Italy or is this some weird new thing?

the obvious difference is that this new nationalism seems more concerned with a kind of isolationism, retrenchment, and the like. WW2 Japan, Italy, and Germany were more or less embarking on colonial adventures, no? at the very least the whole "autarky" idea which drove hitler and his ilk is surely a player here but i have seen no desire for expansionism, or securing "lebensraum" or any of that. it would well be that this represents merely an internal momentum that will eventually turn outward but it's hard to say.

i have seen no desire for expansionism, or securing "lebensraum" or any of that.

Russian patriots were mentioned.

failure to integrate restive Muslim populations in Europe is obvious #1 driver, I think. maybe even in US too. there's a strong desire to make this problem "just go away"

not (yet) driven by desire for military adventuring, if anything the opposite

maybe even in US too.

What, all 1% of them?

I thought the US has done an admirable job integrating our Muslim citizens and might have been a model.

(Not to say there were no problems just comparably that the melting pot model might still be resilient)

Possibly because there's so few of them?

i think as this century goes on we're gonna see ever greater pressure put on the distinction (increasingly explicit) between those are afforded the benefits of the security apparatus of the modern nation state and those who will be reduced, essentially, to barbarians at the gate. hope i shuffle off before it gets worse but it will.

Also they seem, from the the perspective of the UK, more middle class. More like the Indian community in the UK. (xp)

on an optimistic note, however, i think we're about to see, in the US at least, a real revival of progressive politics at the grass roots level--trump will have his own version of the tea party to deal with. whether this accelerates the rightward drift or slows it down is impossible to say.

World population predictions suggest you're right.

Re your first point.

yeah, and the "security" idea may be the key to really fleshing out how this differs from the 30s. this is about drawing the ladder up after you.

Possibly because there's so few of them?

also a lot more space, also geographically isolated: when the US pulls some shit in the middle east it is Europe that has to clean up after.

What, all 1% of them?

not saying it's rational, but my sense is that an overwhelming majority of Americans want a complete stop to further Muslim immigration to the US, although can't/won't admit this in public. I think this is a wedge issue

other contributors, specific to US:

* dismay at recent riots, strong desire to keep crime rate low. Fear of a return to early 90s crime rates looms large in the minds of older Americans, especially property owners. yes it's racist
* street-level knowledge of Mexican black-tar heroin distribution rings and frustration at meaningful law enforcement efforts to curb them (think this underreported issue might have swung Ohio and PA)
* frustration with PC witch hunts, desire never to hear word "microaggression" again, don't want to lose job over a stray tweet
* visceral, gut-level hatred of HRC

also—and this is worldwide—a sense that the left no longer has any ideas, and indeed, that what's called the "left" is just a placeholder for centrist, technocratic, ineffective political management

* frustration with PC witch hunts, desire never to hear word "microaggression" again, don't want to lose job over a stray tweet

Think there has been a massive failure with this, it's true - failure to communicate the fact that most/all of us humans still have some level of sexism / racism / prejudice and that it's all of our duty as rational human beings to recognise and deal with that. There has been a tendency to pull out somebody's off-colour remark or bad-taste joke and go after them as "the enemy" - the (silent) reaction of many is going to be that they've said similar things before and are scared they will be next - witch-hunts do not lead to the needed self-questioning, and this needs to be recognised quickly. (Want to be clear that I'm not saying we should in any way compromise with genuine shitbags or give white males special treatment, in case anyone was wondering)

a placeholder for centrist, technocratic, ineffective political management

tbf, as government goes, this is one of the most benign formulations any of us is ever likely to live under. just about anything we exchange this for will be worse.

It's so weird this worldwide international nationalism right I feel like we've barely touched on it but it's obv very real. Is it comparable to Germany Japan and Italy or is this some weird new thing?

Key difference I suppose is that 30s Axis countries didn't have the same historical perspective on 30s Axis countries that we do. Well, duh. Obviously. But seems worth clarifying? Mussolini didn't have to deal with people comparing him to Mussolini, or have to sell himself to people who knew that Mussolini was a bad thing.

What do Russian patriots and US patriots and French patriots really have in common? It's really international white supremacism isn't t?

Well, re: Russia: in a country on a whole other scale to most, several decades of Soviet communism (never really tried before, a historically new thing) flat-out eradicate traditional bourgeois liberalism (its people, its institutions, the very idea itself). Then communism is wiped out, with no concern for what actually gets left over. Leaving what? Nationalism in a weird, purified form.

As to France, well. Assuming the 19th century situation underlies and to some extent determines the 21st century situation. The British Empire was paternalistic towards its subjects. Within that there is at least a route towards a genuinely fraternal relationship later. Compare to the French Empire ...? Going back further into the past of each country, could also compare our patchy, organic, wooly semi-secularism-or-is-it to France's one fell swoop highly abstract and centrally planned secularism (as influences on how things play out today).

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society. It's a bad take but probably one that needs to be kept in mind.

Talking about "Russian nationalism" as 'a thing' is close to meaningless. Russia has a number of competing strains of nationalism. The government form does have some fairly traditional links to post-imperial anxiety, defence, declining birthrate, etc, etc, as well as harsh laws against undocumented workers but it's also the default party for millions of Muslim / non-white Russians, has built extremely strong alliances with Muslim power bases, has a Minister of Defence (and possible future leader) from an Asian Buddhist/Animist minority (though he is probably orthodox), has actively courted Jewish business and religious leaders and has good ties with Israel, etc. The capital-letters Russian Nationalism of Zhirinovsky, etc, is much closer to the traditional international far right but there's also a strain of what i interpret as white nationalism / antisemitism in a lot of the 'liberal' opposition to Putin (Navalny, etc) who resent what they see as un-European influences on the country.

What underpins most of the mainstream nationalism (in the anti-free trade, pro-nationalisation, Russia must be strong and independent, keep your nose out of our business, sense) is the complete, nightmarish failure of what was presented as internationalist liberalism in the 90s.

France has always had a vocal minority of people who have been happy to vote for a fascist Le Pen. Would Marine have as much support as she does now without that traditional racist / French exceptionalist strain? No. Would she have less support if France didn't have the same youth unemployment rate as Portugal - with a quarter of young people unable to find a job? Probably not.

It's possibly more interesting to look at the huge success of antisemitic / conspiracy-theorising Catholic revanchism in Poland where, if you look at the data, you'd think the economy has been performing substantially better than almost anywhere in Europe, the previous government was a model of efficiency, etc. One of the things that keeps getting called out is the fact that the rising tide has not lifted all boats - rural areas, low-skilled workers and pensioners have all had to deal with huge increases in the cost of living without seeing many of the benefits of the booming urban zones.

Does that explain Orban? Does it explain the Baltic state rehabilitating their Nazi war criminals? Is centering "whiteness" a mistake in itself given the rise of populist neo-Fascism in India and the Philippines? idk.

Would Marine have as much support as she does now without that traditional racist / French exceptionalist strain? No. Would she have less support if France didn't have the same youth unemployment rate as Portugal - with a quarter of young people unable to find a job? Probably not.

That should have been 'probably', obvs.

also—and this is worldwide—a sense that the left no longer has any ideas

Most of this thread is over my head but maybe the problem isn't that "the left" is out of ideas but that they've already all been rejected or made to seem so fringe-y that everyone has decided to stick with predatory capitalism or whatever system enriches the already powerful and is painted as more "reasonable" than open borders, universal basic income, participatory structures, socialism, etc etc....

the left's place in mainstream politics has been aggressively and systematically co-opted. we saw a little of the friction caused by the left trying to reassert itself with sanders but much more exaggerated and transparent with the reaction to corbyn in the uk.

just rehashing here but the "right wing drift" is in 2 parts, chronic rightward drift of the centre and acute rise of the extreme right as part of the overall reaction to the centre. the sidelining of the left is a big part of the former of course, but when the latter occurs it makes the rightward reaction more obvious and effective because the alternative of the leftward reaction is more obscure and marginalized

The left has tons of ideas! Obamacare, single payer healthcare, free college, affordable college, universal basic income, police accountability, cap and trade, carbon taxes, investments in green energy, bolstering the epa, immigration amnesty, a three pronged approach, pacifist foreign policy, cautious foreign policy, leading from behind... The trumpist right is nearly down on ideas, in fact, they're down to one: Build a wall. But it's a big one. Problem is, the left has no one big idea anymore, instead it's a coalition of small ideas, but too many people treat their idea as the one big idea that should be more important than anything, and then go away and skulk when inevitably that fails to become universally accepted.

lol most that stuff u just listed was pilloried as the crazy rantings of deluded Bernie Bros. who don't know "how government really works"

Yep, and I've also included a lot of clintonist compromise, which was pilloried as selloutism and just as bad as Trump. That's kinda my point.

xp Yes that was my point above. Those are sound ideas afaict but have been pushed into the margins and discredited by...whomever could be said to control the space of discourse. Traditional media? Right and center-right electeds and Koch-funded interest groups masquerading as policy makers? Idk.

a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society

I think the Trump supporters perceive this accurately, FWIW.

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think this is what sunk the left. Trump's ability to withstand a PC-witch hunt/economic blackmail was key to his early popularity, and it drove a lot of people to the polls.

On the other hand, self-congratulatory "political incorrectness" morphed into vicious, open racism by the campaign's end. I expect this will get worse before it gets better.

anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society

Wtf constitutes polite society when all their discourse is shallowly encoded racism?? Letting ppl feel good about their bigotry because challenging it is "impolite"? Ceding over the space to talk about politics or policy because it's considered a private matter, so that ppl can never be confronted about their prejudice and hate?

otm

A friend of mine from another school says that what feels craziest to her--she knows some of her colleagues are Trump fans--is that instead of mourning together, everyone is very carefully not talking about it. The narrative for a lot of schools in NYC is being united and giving time to comfort children's fears, let students say what they feel, ask if their families will be safe, doing healing activities, and gearing up to protect our communities. But in places where not everyone is united (ie let's be real, places with exurban/suburban white ppl on staff), it's this big off-limits "controversial" topic lest any of our racist colleagues feel impugned.

Letting ppl feel good about their bigotry because challenging it is "impolite"

There's a difference between this, which is constructive, and the co-ordinated public shaming campaigns that were a recurrent public feature of Obama's second term. There was a lot of bullying from the left, and a lot of hypocritical scolding. New York media was particularly bad, and I say this as a participating member. Academia was worse.

Anti-racist arguments must continue to be made. This is especially important now, with openly bigoted elements of American society in ascendence. But the tone has to change. There's proof it doesn't work.

I think I might be really far outside of whatever you're talking about. I can't think of anything I know of that qualifies as PC haranguing or hypocritical scolding or w/e, I guess outside of thinkpieces on like xojane or whatever crappy sources with low standards for content quality.

I try to argue with friends and colleagues about racist and bigoted attitudes and policies. Have done it a lot since Brexit and try to do it respectfully and honestly. There is a swathe of people who are massively butthurt and angry at the mere suggestion that bigoted opinions are bigoted. How do you "reach" them? How do you hold a discussion with people who demand their entitlement to think in terms of prejudice and generalized hate?

it feels like nothing works unless those people have to live and work and hang out with people of the groups about whom they are bigoted

I think I might be really far outside of whatever you're talking about. I can't think of anything I know of that qualifies as PC haranguing or hypocritical scolding or w/e, I guess outside of thinkpieces on like xojane or whatever crappy sources with low standards for content quality.

I think this is otm, fwiw.

What's described as political correctness is overwhelmingly the kind of strong, critical, educationally-focused challenge to bigotry, both hard and soft, that should be taking place, imo. It's unequivocally a good thing and, for the most part, despite an over-reliance on academic jargon at times, done in the right way. The kind of performative talk you occasionally see from (white) clickbait commentators celebrating the demise of the white man as a relevant political actor is (obviously with hindsight) wrong and could barely be more counterproductive if it tried. The idea that white working class interests and the interests of minorities are necessarily in conflict, and no amount of learning or proactive attempts at forging solidarity can change that, is poisonous and needs to be confronted with almost as much vehemence as racism itself. It has a much wider reach than the kind of useful discussions taking place in schools, offices, etc.

I think there are broader / more common issues with the way that race is discussed in liberal circles but that's probably a discussion for a different day.

i think an anti-PC backlash probably has something to do with the right-wing drift but i think it's a very very minor piece. after all the PC policing, no matter how annoying or misguided it may be, is a response to something already in the culture - the bigotry it's trying to address. it's like saying that blowing air canisters at the burning building caused the fire - at most they made the fire worse but they didn't light the match.

I've been surprised by post-election discussions with a priori "liberal" American friends, Sanders supporters, who are "I told you so"ing me that making the election a referendum on race or gender would backfire because white men people have "opinions" about those that may sound, but are not, problematic, and have not been addressed respectively enough. "Evidence": campus wars (that as a tenured humanities professor I seem to have missed), hate speech laws, people feeling bad about having weird feeling about trans people, etc. People got upset and voted Trump. Hmm.

So yeah, discussions of race and gender in liberal circles : a good topic : because "the left" contains multitudes here, and going forward we're going to need to find our ways through this.

i have a five year old and when i harangue him or raise my voice or make him feel guilty, it backfires and it makes it worse. what works is when i quietly roll my eyes and adopt a gentle tone and say the same things but express them in a more positive way and talk him down. so i think maybe sometimes the way to talk to bigoted assholes is to talk to them like the children they are.

like they deserve a tongue-lashing, but i always worry that it just makes them more angry and drives them away and into the waiting arms of breitbart and the like.

The idea that white working class interests and the interests of minorities are necessarily in conflict, and no amount of learning or proactive attempts at forging solidarity can change that, is poisonous and needs to be confronted with almost as much vehemence as racism itself. It has a much wider reach than the kind of useful discussions taking place in schools, offices, etc.

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Thursday, November 10, 2016 12:34 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm.

i have a five year old and when i harangue him or raise my voice or make him feel guilty, it backfires and it makes it worse. what works is when i quietly roll my eyes and adopt a gentle tone and say the same things but express them in a more positive way and talk him down. so i think maybe sometimes the way to talk to bigoted assholes is to talk to them like the children they are.

I agree with the impulse here but the basic condescension of this is exactly what ppl find insulting and dismissive! And yet, if you aren't supposed to "harangue" them (which I guess is anything that makes them feel embarrassed/persecuted/defensive??) and you're not supposed to patronize them, how the fuck are you supposed to interact with people who have said by their actions that racism and misogyny are acceptable or even desirable.

ShariVari otm there

i'm not saying it would work, btw! i think racism is such a deeply entrenched thing that certain segments of the adult population are beyond repair and beyond hope.

Also let's face it none of us has unlimited wells of emotional energy to hold these assholes' hands through this. I mean as white ppl it's our job to go out and corral our idiots and bring them into the light however we have to, but as individuals we have limits of how many times we can nod patiently at "It's not about race!" or some goddamn bullshit and be patient teachers. Personally I'm on the verge of tears 24/7 but I work with ppl who say things like "This school started to go downhill when the Black kids started coming here" and "No one helped my grandparents who spoke Italian, so why should we translate for immigrant families?" so that uses me up p much from jump.

like i sorta said in one of the other half dozen threads about this miserable week, i think in an era where people have increasing access to media that tells them what they want to hear and only presents evidence that supports their beliefs, it only gets more difficult.

i can't even look at any Facebook post which mentions the election and then i see 20 comments bc i know i'm going to read something exhausting and infuriating. i can't even talk to my cousins anymore.

I don't believe this drift in question is going to be solved by hand-holding or outreach. It is a response to major global issues, population shifts, maybe climate change effects, changing economies, etc. If someone votes for Le Pen because they want all Muslims out of France there's no amount of soft-talk you can give them to change their mind. So if you find that kind of work exhausting - and I can understand why you would - I wouldn't even bother. At best it's a drop in the bucket but more likely it's just nothingness to fill the empty space of despair in a world where our actions seem to lack any real impact.

i feel like living in los angeles my voice has zero impact, i don't talk to anyone in person who needs convincing. everyone pretty much agrees on how shitty this all is. meanwhile, somewhere else everyone is agreeing on how awesome it is. and we'll only meet online and that never ends well.

We're all caught in a tidal wave and some ppl are saying we just need to bail the water out with our little beach buckets and that'll keep us afloat. I posit a. we are at the mercy of an unfolding history that we can only observe not effect and b. that history is complex and we barely understand enough of it to even know what we're looking at. Actually I think Benjamin's thing is probably closer to what I want to express here --

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Klee,_paul,_angelus_novus,_1920.jpg/240px-Klee,_paul,_angelus_novus,_1920.jpg

io is especially otm here but yes to everything posted in the last 30 mins. Even patient arguing feels like a privileged response

The protoypical voter who decided this election was a white, middle-class Rust Belt independent who voted for Obama in 08 and perhaps 12, then switched to Trump in 16. (Think Ken Bone.)

These are decent people and not deliberately racist. However, they often hold certain unexamined assumptions that are startlingly bigoted. Obama was able to reach them, partly through patience, partly through even-handedness, and partly by simply embodying in his person an effective counterexample to many of their worst prejudices.

Clinton, who had a more imperial, entitled tone, was not.

tbqh, although personal outreach (particularly to friends and family) is useful wherever possible, it's never going to be sufficient. The idea that universal tolerance at an individual level would mean the death of racism is one the areas where i think a lot of well-meaning liberal analysis goes off track. As things stand, i don't really see much alternative to trying to proactively forge solidarity through mutual self interest - whether that's organised labour, breaking down barriers to education, healthcare, etc. It's obviously easier said than done but that has to be where the left's attention is.

I think that's right. Approaching racism as an individual moral failing may be accurate but it doesn't address that a lot of it is driven by a zero-sum attitude towards access to dwindling resources. If your race is your one and only ticket to be part of the "in" group, the ones deserving of protection, then to attack a racist directly will in fact exacerbate that anxiety. You can't demand empathy from others unless you offer it first.

Even patient arguing feels like a privileged response

Over here in brexit land, behind the racism is usually big personal problems/money problems/mix of that the person has and I wd say you shouldn't feel like you have to be able to tackle those problems if you aren't their psychologist therefore perhaps engagement on an individual level should be swapped for something else

I should add: you are under no obligation to offer empathy to a racist

That's fine, I have no intentions in that direction anyway.

I rarely have political arguments with people I disagree with this much and there are people I know who it would take such a heroic effort to possibly convince them that you'd be throwing away your own life in the process, so I just end up barely talking to them at all. My brother has worn down my father about some things but it taken a very long time and they're always around each other.

Again, I'm not the most experienced but I'd suggest trying to appeal to people's compassion if they have any. There was a guy online I was friendly with who did this racial caricature on an art site and I asked him if he had any black friends and how they might feel about his drawing. He said that convinced him to take it down but if I called him a bigot I think he may have stubbornly kept it up. I'm not sure though.

Today I tried on another forum to get the Trump supporters to consider the non-whites who have been physically attacked by Trump supporters and they were incredibly dismissive and made a bunch of piss poor arguments, including a middle eastern guy with scary far right sympathies. It's going to be weird there because those Trump supporters are some of the most frequent posters.

I mean a crucial thing here is lots of these people believe that they are not racist (and that racism is a false charge always being leveled at them)

So they're primed to dismiss these criticisms

I don't think of arguing issues with people ad a solution so much as a question of moral honesty. I spend a lot of time, in pubs for example, with people I like and who want to talk about politics. Can't just nod and acquiesce.

i understand your point and i myself exercise that (but not most of the time). but nodding does wonders for understanding the inner functions of a person's thoughts, especially over a pint

My partner has profited from betting on Brexit and Trump now. I'm thinking of lumping on Le Pen just to jinx the fascist gravy train, or get myself out of the overdraft - not exactly win-win more like win-lose ore lose-win:(

there are people I know who it would take such a heroic effort to possibly convince them that you'd be throwing away your own life in the process, so I just end up barely talking to them at all.

"Behind every woke straight man are 25 exhausted feminists" or something like that.

in general I think you changes people's minds not through arguing points but by offering a more compelling picture of the world. the space and patience that requires are v difficult to find now that any attention space is saturated and there are so many stories out there that you can easily find an overwhelming tide of material to support any view. it's striking if you try to compare the rise of populist authoritarian politics now bears with the 20s&30s bc the people drawn to it now are living vastly more comfortable lives in much more stable polities. people are awful at realising in what respects they've got a good deal. an insomniac media doesn't help, and media/discourse/thinking in general is structurally predisposed towards alarmism and instilling a sense of crisis. this sort of politics depends on spectacle and society has become v spectacular, so it's easy to see why people's confidence in democracy has weakened

booming post

Guys - I am not thread policing at all and I'm very happy if this thread can be used to give comfort of any sort to any/all of us working out our issues but I do kinda wonder if we could move more away from the question of "how to change things" to the question of "what is going on / why are things this way" and particularly with an eye on this as a global phenomenon as opposed to a uniquely American one. Because there are specific reasons Trump won that are unique to the US, but from a long view / as part of a trend / those unique reasons don't always follow. Or maybe the question of "how do you convince people not to be racist" would make more sense in broader terms if it was "how do you convince people not to be xenophobic" which is in some ways a much scarier question that is much harder to answer?

nb that I do think the Internet and social media news has a role to play in this as well tho I wonder if its more amplifying these other things rather than being the source

xxp I'm impressed you can even read it, at least today I can blame being so jumbled on being ill

What ShariVari and ryan say resonates with me: building class solidarity is the task going forward, across communities. Then there's another way forward besides fascism and neo-liberalism.

Like I want to say is: what's going on globally is that communism remains discredited, but it's needed as an option more than ever.

in general I think you changes people's minds not through arguing points but by offering a more compelling picture of the world.

I've tried really hard to do this with some white parents at my school w/r/t their feelings about both Black Americans and our immigrant families. I've offered them the chance to be on a winning side as our programs succeed. I've tried to celebrate them pre-emptively for supporting minority groups. I've shown that this is the only tactic that will result in their OWN success as a parent organization and how robust their group could be if lots of ppl pitched in, how much of a relief it would be to share the work, and more.

I never get anything more than tepid agreement for 10 minutes until a competing opinion/factoid is ranted by another person in the office. I've decided they don't actually WANT a better future. They like this one because it makes them victims and gives them something to endlessly complain and bicker about.

xp the 'personalized feed' structure of facebook, twitter, etc. certainly enables people to create their own echo chambers which makes it harder to fight back against viral misinformation

Like I want to say is: what's going on globally is that communism remains discredited, but it's needed as an option more than ever.

OTM the protectionism/victim-ism is coming from resource scarcity in ppl's lives and that is the fault of capitalism on an individual and a global scale.

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society. It's a bad take but probably one that needs to be kept in mind.

I think this view is very widespread. I used to work in a call-centre, the staff overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly working class, mostly female, the people running the place and making decisions were remote and rarely communicated with us directly, but were palpably more middle class, and overwhelmingly male. Pretty much the defining feature of the place was that we were constantly being ordered to carry out our work duties in ways which seemed obviously counterproductive, or which seemed to have been decided by people who didn't properly understand what was going on at the customer facing end of the business. Instructions on how to do certain tasks were constantly being changed or completely reversed, usually with no explanation to us of why, people were very aware that they were not judged important enough for it to be worth explaining why a procedure had been changed, they were just told to get on with it. The general atmosphere was one of sullen acquiescence and resentment. Every year we would have this mandatory diversity training course and it was the exact same thing: being talked down to by middle class people, my co-workers often (genuinely imo) did not understand why certain things we were warned against were offensive, but there way a sullen acceptance and knowledge that arguing about it would not make any difference, awareness that they were not important enough to be given explanations why certain things were wrong beyond "because I say so", and the griping in private after it was finished. News stories about some celebrity being censured for a politically incorrect gaffe would be received in a similar way, as some remote capricious authority coming down on people for not following a set of incomprehensible and nonsensical rules. And a lot, most, of these people did have ugly hateful, racist views that needed challenging, I don't know how you go about challenging those without reinforcing this resentment.

A lot of them had positive things to say about UKIP, though I get the impression that most of them thought the party was too incompetent to vote for. I imagine that a lot of them voted for brexit, and that this idea of a remote incomprehensible bureaucracy that was dictating their lives would have resonated with them.

Alternatives to neo-liberalism, ones that are more humane and people-focused, need a rebranding. In the US words like "communism" and "socialism" carry too much baggage, especially since they carry the legacy of failed states and atrocities. I remember joining the YCL in 7th grade in the 90s during my more idealistic days, and dropped out in high school because a lot of people won't buy anything with the word "communism" or "socialism" attached to it. It's dead the in water, it was back then, and it still is today.

What I realized back then, and I still think it's true now, is that something entirely new needs to be created with new terminology. Until that happens I doubt we'll get our better alternatives.

it's striking if you try to compare the rise of populist authoritarian politics now bears with the 20s&30s bc the people drawn to it now are living vastly more comfortable lives in much more stable polities. people are awful at realising in what respects they've got a good deal.

been really fascinated by this idea for a while. how do you square the generalized anxiety in the air with the historically unprecedented levels of comfort and security? (this does not, obviously, apply to everyone but it does apply to most white people in, say, wisconsin.) the day to day experience of risk is low, and yet we are beset with overwhelming fears of catastrophic risk, system failure, encroaching dark futures. there's something about the current order that needs individuals to persist in a heightened state of alertness and anxiety in a way that i've been trying to track back to the protestant ethic but you needn't really get that academic about it. when people are pulled away from each other, when all we have is a cult of individual entrepreneurship, the result is this lonely anxious misery which inevitably finds its ready outlets. it's not just poverty imo, it's a kind of fear that and isolation that runs deeper.

Isn't this why inequality (within a given polity) is more poisonous than a notional standard of living, expressed globally?

I was talking to my therapist a bit about this last night. I experience tremendous anxiety despite living an extraordinarily comfortable life and I think some of it is that in my gut I realize how tenuous and fragile society and our stability is and so this comfort almost feels like a forgery or a mirage - it's illusory and I'm constantly waiting for the fog to lift and see that no, actually we now live in the apocalypse. I wonder how much that is true for a lot of people - that it's not /normal/ to be so safe and so it feels like it can't be real. The other big component I think is the West's cult of individuality and the general lack of sittlichtkeit that people have. It seems like so many ppl feel alienated from their families and their communities. You hear all the time about how it used to be that everyone knew their neighbors and now no one knows their neighbors, etc. That kind of loneliness I agree probably has something to do with it. I think maybe the third thing is just that we have failed to provide meaning for people - we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life and we don't have much in the way of national cohesiveness. I remember reading that Israelis have some of the highest reported rates of happiness in the world because they believe that where they are and what they are doing and what they are a part of is important and meaningful.

idk, ryan I think a lot of this overlaps with your post but some stray thoughts on the topic. I remember we discussed this question a little bit on the political philosophy thread not that long ago?

as an addendum: i don't know how afraid to be but the apocalyptic reaction on the left strikes me as possibly just feeding the same beast that's causing all this. i choose to be optimistic and see this moment as the traumatic birth of a new progressive political movement--hopefully a ferocious one. here, now, is a moment to articulate alternatives.

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society.

this is not so far out of step with how the term was originally used by leftists

that's all very well said, mordy. i lead a reasonably comfortable life too and suffer from lots of anxiety. part of my way of coping with it is to academically study the sociological roots of it. i'd like to go back to the likes of christopher lasch, auden's "age of anxiety," more weber, etc.

we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath.

we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life

Or see it primarily as a weapon used by the right.

I absolutely get the lack of community as a driver of anxiety though - I live in a university town 2,000 miles from where I grew up. Nobody I know (primarily university faculty and staff) is from here originally, and the school is just big and well-known enough that everyone always has one foot out the door thinking they could end up somewhere even bigger or more prestigious; my wife is being recruited by two places right now, both much larger and one of them is probably top three in her field prestige-wise.

So nobody has any real long term community, or never puts down roots that go too deep. I know my neighbors fairly well, but they're all in the same situation - always pondering the next move. It makes me feel constantly edgy and unsettled despite having an objectively worry-free life.

"we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath."

or other ways of living those practices. See Charles Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity (originally The Malaises of Modernity) and A Catholic Modernity, and his A Secular Age for an even fuller story. Weber is important here.

I imagine that a lot of them voted for brexit, and that this idea of a remote incomprehensible bureaucracy that was dictating their lives would have resonated with them.

I read a thing correlating Brexit voting with an external "locus of control", the belief that you don't have much control over the things that happen in your day-to-day life:
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/brexit-britain-british-election-study-insights-from-the-post-eu-referendum-wave-of-the-bes-internet-panel/#.WCTq9_mLTIU

which I found interesting though I'm not sure how much can be read into it

(in general psychological terms I have a p. external LoC myself and kind of think "I have no control over the direction my life or anything else in this country is going in, so it would be nice if there was a structure outside this insane country to appeal to")

thanks Euler for the reccs! will check those out.

yes - the death/absence of faith is v important. I feel like a patronizing dick when I tell people who have faith that I admire it but don't share it, but the problem I think isn't insincerity but an inability to articulate a secular equivalent. And I think we really need a secular equivalent

yeah I mean I'm a practicing Catholic and I think secular alternatives are needed too

I really hate to link to the_donald on here, so I'll just screenshot this to show you what they are up to today. Yeah, it's beyond grim.

http://i.imgur.com/lYCrktY.jpg

Thanks for sharing that. They understand that the stakes are worldwide so we should too. I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward. I feel like no one really bothered to think through it because no one really expected Trump to win. What will be the role of the UN and will it continue to exist / what is the new role of international authority / will all international relationships now boil down to might makes right. And what are the consequences of that for every major current geopolitical tension dormant and active? I think I read today that Trump was already making conciliatory gestures towards NATO and our Asian allies?

I think there's still an underlying assumption - and I'm probably clinging to it - that Trump will be reined in by the orthodoxy

even the Republican orthodoxy though could seriously upend things. how long have they been calling for us to kick out the UN or withdraw funding? they like NATO because they like putting pressure on Russia but they dgaf about 99% of international diplomacy otherwise

i dont know about "reined in" but it's really less trump himself who scares me (i think he's a psychologically weak person and it's probably dawning on him at this very minute that he doesn't want this job anymore--he clearly has no capacity or patience for it) but the monstrous true-believer hacks to which he will delegate his authority. he strikes me as a fairly easy person to manipulate. he will be a weak president, but that doesn't mean his administration will be, unfortunately. the best case scenario strikes me as most likely: a really bad republican administration of the likes we have experienced before but one that will get rolled "bigly" in 2/4 years. (this is me bargaining with the future)

(i mean, im no expert on this stuff, but there's certainly a way of interpreting the results of the election that spell major trouble for the GOP very soon. this crazy election was the 10% chance and it paid off for them...that kind of "luck" wont repeat itself) (again indulging myself here)

another way of putting that is that it's hard to say it's a right wing "wave" when it's more or less the same minority of people who always vote republican who turned out. there was just inexplicable complacency on the other side. if trump pulled obama numbers i'd say otherwise.

midterms not looking that great for gems http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-election-results-senate-20161108-story.html

incumbents usually win elections and in the next presidential election president trump will have the republican machine behind him 100%

we have no idea who the democrat candidate will be

lol dems even

Yeah don't get me wrong a lot of the Republican orthodoxy is definitely more noxious than Trump, this is cold comfort

I'm not articulating fully cos I'm on my phone in the pub

piaooc but its all <3

I think there's still an underlying assumption - and I'm probably clinging to it - that Trump will be reined in by the orthodoxy

the opposite is more likely

I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward

fracturing of international alliances
controls on movements of capital, goods and people
less "interventionist" war, more straight-up "give us that" war (more war overall)
persecution of ethnic minorities worldwide
general abandoment of human decency

it's bad

the concept of nations allying will not end - there will be new/different alliances. maybe more isolationism but country's interests will continue to overlap.

this comfort almost feels like a forgery or a mirage - it's illusory and I'm constantly waiting for the fog to lift and see that no, actually we now live in the apocalypse

idk how far you can go with this before it becomes straight delusional. yr describing the plot of the matrix. idk I am not an anxious person at all and I think you can normally tell from hearing people mull over politics if they are. the idea that spiritual community performs a unique and essential role is politically conservative and imo deeply unhistorical. the social worlds my ancestors inhabited were much poorer, blander, restricted and fearful (they couldn't have any intercontinental back and forth like this for one). I don't think the fact that they would have considered themselves to be more in touch with god made their lives more meaningful. this seems like quite a tangent to a general rightwards drift in any case, I don't think it lines up very well with the demographics we're worrying about

Maybe Matrix-like in the sense that living in such comfort while so much of the world does not is a kind of false reality about the nature of life [for most humans]. But that wasn't what I meant - I meant that society and civilization seem very stable. We go about our lives assuming that the government will continue to function, that the businesses will remain open, that the banks will have money. But we know that societies can crumble and quickly and almost without warning. Look around the world. Look at history. Stability is a rarity. That's what I was pointing to - not that this stability is fake; it is real. I was pointing out that this stability is fragile and foolish to trust as permanent. It's more like waiting for a second shoe to drop sort of dynamic.

most of human history has been tediously stable, mainly just due the slow rate of change and development. people were understandably more aware of their mortality, but empires lasted over 1000 years, and for most of our history the whole idea of progress/development/the zeitgeist/the tech tree from civilization was absent.

it depends what sort of collapse you're worried about. the modern world has increasingly become m/l one big interconnected network over the past 500 years, and understanding the implications of that is where I part company with alt-right types who cling to some sort of essential human tribalism (which apparently operates on the level of westphalian sovereignty). there is more shared interest than ever before, and the population explosion also has the effect of further diffusing crises imo. I think any economic or political collapse would not be both global and sudden. the global system is too vast and complex. so I can worry about supernovas or nuclear idiocy but I think humanity has solved the barbarian issue and global totalitarianism would require an unprecedented and currently infeasible level of coordination

Keep in mind I may have a drastically different perspective on the stability of human history than you bc of my background.

My family didn't get here very long ago, it wasn't great where they were coming from and they didn't hadn't gotten there too much longer before that. It's not hyperbole to say that my grandparents' lives were far more turbulent and dangerous than I can even relate to.

But even if you're family is from a long standing Western nation that is relatively stable WW2 was not long ago. Bloody revolutions throughout the Western world, from France to the US to Russia, are only a couple hundred years old. Before there are long periods of war and instability. I'm not sure I buy this notion of "most of human history has been tediously stable."

your*

yeah I appreciate that, & ofc I'm not saying there's no need to worry about nationalism or genocide. grand scale civilizational collapse being much more difficult than ever before obviously doesn't reduce individual, community, national or regional level risks

I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward
fracturing of international alliances
controls on movements of capital, goods and people
less "interventionist" war, more straight-up "give us that" war (more war overall)
persecution of ethnic minorities worldwide
general abandoment of human decency

it's bad

― it me

otm :(

this is a total tangent but trying to account for the pull (or lack of pull) of the idea of apocalypse is interesting. I think what makes modern atrocities so real and alarming to me is exactly the fact that they are so easily accommodated within the world system. knowing that people who have committed genocide are living lives in many ways v similar to mine is unsettling in a way remote historical atrocities can't be. in a sense that's similar to mordy's worry - that civilization is a facade that doesn't really insulate you

I think any economic or political collapse would not be both global and sudden. the global system is too vast and complex.

OTOH, I have no problem believing in a sudden domino effect resulting from climate change. Sea water overrunning Bangladesh rice production, desert areas becoming uninhabitable from the heat. Pretty much anything we're talking about in the global warming thread could bring about rapid change.

This movie to thread: The Act of Killing - 2013 Documentary

xp

"we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath."

Ryan otm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-stone/history-tells-us-what-will-brexit-trump_b_11179774.html

seems plausible tbh

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way  —  all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say, “Oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??” But they don’t realize that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.
An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honor NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

Putin will def press his hand and outsmart Trump otoh he seems smart enough to not risk an actual nuclear exchange which he would have no hope of winning

This is completely moronic for any number of reasons.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

It's on people's radars over here.

It's a shame to pluck one idiotic whimsy from the rest but the leader of Poland thinks every other leader of Poland since independence is a Stasi agent and Putin killed his twin brother. They are literally more anti Russian than Ukraine.

LOL, Poland pro-Russian, that'll be the day!

Even a rabidly right wing Hungary might take some convincing.

here are a few other things I could see happening longer-term worldwide

fair market systems superseded by patronage economies
co-ordinated misinformation campaigns + persecution of journalists
centralization of power, fewer congressional/parliamentary checks and controls
more direct-action environmental movements, maybe even violent ones(?)

If Trump is basically allied with Putin and wants no part in any of this then why would anyone press the nuclear button?

South China Sea maybe

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.

i think i still believe in democracy but as of late it's not hard to see why ppl might find it unnecessary or even harmful

Worth noting that the party that leans anti-democratic in this country is also the one doing most of the gerrymandering and vote suppression.

i.e. a fuller commitment to democracy might actually have prevented a trump win

and a gop congress

As a term, "essential" is pretty open to interpretation tbf. If I were to take that sentence literally, it is pretty clear that democracy is not essential for people to live.

i'm not sure that's relevant since it's tracking a decline over time. however the respondents interpreted the question they think it's significantly less essential now than it was since the 30s.

they got people to say how important democracy is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being "essential", so the way they've formatted the results "people who don't think democracy is essential" = everyone who voted anything from 1 to 9, I think?

so there is a change corresponding with age, but probably less dramatic than it first appears

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

also that doesn't speak at all to the other troubling indicators such as

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

If I'm reading the graph correctly, it's not tracking a decline over time but tracking differences between age groups. 1930s-80s refers to DOB.

(xp)

yep. the graph is saying people born in the 1930s view democracy as more "essential" than people born in the 1980s

for some odd reason

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

I saw someone discussing it on twitter. there's some details on page 7 here:

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf

(um, on page 4 on the pdf, rather. but it says page 7 at the top of the page)

I'm sort of playing devil's advocate, but it could just as easily mean that younger people are more critical and have been less conditioned by Cold War-era experiences and propaganda when it comes to i) how 'democratic' their own countries and the existing international order are and ii) whether the existence of other 'undemocratic' countries is actually going to lead to a nuclear apocalypse that will make life impossible.

I got nothing re Americans' increased appreciation for military rule, though.

because as americans we've been fellating the military steadily ever since 9/11

of all institutions in this country, the military is the only one polling over 30%

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx

Because people don't serve in it.

I am pretty worried about what BRUMPXIT means for democracy, not just because I think Loomis is right about how McCrory is setting the example for other GOP incumbents to follow from here on out, but for the potential loss of faith in democratic systems that all this shit is causing in the young & impressionable.

I guess we'll see which way the pendulum swings on Sunday, when Austria has another opportunity to vote in the first far-right head of state since WWII. I'm not feeling hopeful.

That seventy-year gap seems to be an awfully big contributor to the rise of these sentiments. There's hardly anyone around anymore who had first-hand experience with this shit back in the day. History's boring! Democracy's lame! It's time for something new and fresh and exciting!

I think people's indifference runs a little bit deeper than "ugh, lame". democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

"democracy" is too vague a term to usefully discuss in any detail imo

leaving aside the efficacy of voting, in the UK at least the scope of democracy i.e. the commons has been shrunk over the long term. I think you could make a good case that this has been inversely correlated with increased suffrage - even the likes of peter hitchens agree on this point. ppl sense that most aspects of the world they live in are beyond the horizons of party politics even though this is inevitably downplayed & not reflected by political rhetoric. without regular reform this is inevitable, but as far as I can tell all modern western govts are built more for stability than flexibility.

Is it possible that people who respond that they'd be ok with military rule just have no idea what that means?

It means the military RULES, duh.

democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

yeah when I saw these results I didn't necessarily see it as a popular embrace of autocracy so much as perceiving that "democracy" as currently practiced fails on its own terms

The problem being that so many people who feel that way decide that attempting to fix a broken system has less appeal than smashing it to bits and replacing it with...I dunno, whatever! Because different is always better.

Because the problems are largely caused by power differentials that the existing systems are set up to protect

Austria not going Nazi (yet!)!

https://twitter.com/AP/status/805445655539892224

every election is going to be like this now

Yeah, I felt more relieved about that than I would like to.

http://i.imgur.com/GjnWi8x.jpg

Mr Mahdalik singled out Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, for contributing to the party’s defeat after he said on Fox News on Friday that Mr Hofer would hold a referendum on Austria leaving the European Union.

“That didn’t help us, it hindered us,” he said, saying that an overwhelming majority of Austrians support EU membership.

Casting his vote in his home town of Pinkafeld earlier on Sunday, Mr Hofer ruled out a referendum and said: “I would ask Mr Farage not to interfere in Austria’s internal affairs.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/04/austria-election-norbert-hofer-cusp-becoming-europes-first-far/

Some good news at last.

It will be clearer in the next couple of days what happened, but voter turnout was extremely high. Woman, the young, and pensioners went VdB, men. the less well-educated, and older working people went Hofer. Super clear country-city split as well going the way you'd expect. I personally think that ultimately Hofer went too nasty in his campaigning even for conservative church ladies who think VdB's a communist.

Thought the men/women split was especially significant. 62% of women voted for VdB, versus 44% of the men.

Here's a good analysis (in German, but you and google should figure it out together): http://derstandard.at/2000048754159/Wer-wem-seine-Stimme-gegeben-hat

Renzi out.

I got nothing re Americans' increased appreciation for military rule, though.

― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r)

they haven't experienced it and don't know what it's actually like. america is in a situation where a lot of people are thinking "man, it couldn't actually be worse than donald trump running the country, could it?"

of course it could and would.

I'm disturbed by the reflexively martial tone of RW people expecting to be thanked for their military service or that of their relatives ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Is this a post-9/11 thing? Previous generations of military people did not shill for gratitude in this way. It's gross, especially when someone barges into a social media thread about BLM/guns/politics in the expectation that we'll all stop whatever we're doing to kiss some camo ass. Most of my friends are polite and do acknowledge them, but I'm suspicious of rightward drift in ordinary discourse and the role these people are happy to play to enable it.

only time i've ever thanked someone from their service was a Disney employee dressed as a green plastic army man from toy story when i was at disneyworld last year

i was informed by a passing floridian that i was 'disrespectful'

loooooooooooool

stephen colbert frequently thanks people for their service with non-military people presumably in order to mock the claustrophobic platitudinous imperative to do so with military people and also with military people because of that imperative or because he sincerely means it or both

xxp a+ would lol again

This seems a very American thing to do.

Only in its specifics - see the UK tabloids' tic of referring to servicemen and women as HEROES whenever mentioned.

Yes, that's just tabloidspeak, nobody really falls for that. In the UK, if somebody was to say "But I was in military" people would just shrug their shoulders and say, "So"?

I assume this is to do with the difference in patriotism between the USA and the UK and possibly numbers going into the services, which has always been fairly low in the UK. Also, in the UK, in the services, you are serving Queen and Country, the monarch comes first, so fuck that for, er, a game of soldiers.

the main thing that bothers me about 'thank you for your service' is the implication that active involvement in the military is inherently of value, which I've got a pretty fundamental problem with

UK people do this too, Help for Heroes isn't just a tabloid thing, but I agree it seems more memeified in the US. Always like to point out that if they're unhappy with the terms and conditions of their employment they should maybe consider getting unionized.

Well it is signing up to be potentially be killed on behalf of others (a bit like firefighting or being a police officer) - it's not fascist to recognize that

xpost

I haven't asked anybody to sign up and potentially kill others on my behalf tbh

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-wonder-what-kind-of-message-im-sending-to-the-tr-11209

it's a career choice, get over yourselves.

Especially given well documented reports of rape and other abuse of power from some military personnel.

nobody really falls for that

not sure why you'd deny there's not a significant number of the 'back our brave boys' persuasion in the UK! Wootoon Bassett and all that - but maybe they're all cardboard cutouts.

I read in the paper that a lot of the troops are complaining about the war, and want to come home. They're putting their lives on the line. It's my duty to support them, but I get confused. What message am I sending the troops if I read articles like that? For that matter, what kind of a message are those troops sending themselves? They are the troops, but it almost sounds like they're not supporting the troops!

I'm sorry. I didn't mean that last statement to sound anti-troops.

occasionally if I tell somebody what I do for a living I get this "oh that's wonderful" spiel and I have to point out that I get paid to do it

Well it is signing up to be potentially be killed on behalf of others (a bit like firefighting or being a police officer) - it's not fascist to recognize that

like nv says, it is signing up with the expectation that you may well have to kill others, and in some cases the hope that you will kill others, eg many who signed up in response to 9/11

xp thanks for your service noodle

it's ok, I get paid for it

I know people who I went to school with who would openly admit they took the queen's shilling for mayhem/violence/adventure and a higher earning potential, none of this bollocks about making it safer for us civilians.

http://ibdp.huluim.com/show_art/4266?size=900x350

cheers for this lads

the only episode of ultimate force i've seen included a shower scene where some of the male cast openly hung dong, which i thought was either a) weirdly progressive for the most otherwise knuckleheaded action show i've ever seen or b) a surprisingly total capitulation to its bulgingly homoerotic subtext

it feels increasingly incongruous but I'm not sure there's ever been an ebb in very earnest and zealous pro-military sentiment from certain sections since the days of empire. still strong enough, at least when combined with islamophobia, to trump freedom of speech in the luton case

It's not even remotely comparable to the US.

god bless our jingoism-free nation

The British Army, in particular, has never really been that popular in Britain. Strangely enough.

I don't feel that's true - based on my experience of the media in this country in recent years.

That's the media, a bunch of public schoolboys trying to second guess the proles.

There probably a London / not-London split.

I live in a big military area and there's a combination of underlying respect (fundraising for the troops, military participation in local community events, etc) and an awareness that they cause half the drunken, late-night trouble in the wider area.

That's the media, a bunch of public schoolboys trying to second guess the proles.

You think decades of cheerleading from the papers has no effect on a significant number of their readers?

you guys should get out of your metropolitan bubble of fruit juice-sipping quakers and meet some real patriots

The British Army, in particular, has never really been that popular in Britain. Strangely enough.

i'd maybe agree they're the least-popular of the military trinity compared to the raf and the navy, but i've never felt they were anything other than a vital part of the 'our brave boys' continuum in public opinion. they're usually the ones talking with clear-eyed composure about their leg-shearing encounters with ieds and the like in those help for heroes ads / iraq documentaries etc which the great british public love so much

My son has autism and doesn't care much for observing minute's silences at football matches. I love the way it winds up some people if he is stimming and making a racket, some outraged patriot from a few rows back shouted Shut Up during the last one and this teenager who also refused to stand turned around and was grinning at Alex with approval for also not giving a fuck. Sadly though, most people where I sit are very much badge/t-shirt wearing Help For Heroes stans.

yelling 'SHUT UP' during a minute's silence in response to a misperceived slight is a perfect example of a partcular strain of britishness, i think

OUTRAGED Britain

My impatience comes from interacting with narrow minded people from home who are less than tolerant of others, but want a free pass for signing up to kill people.

for a while the whole wootton bassett rolling news thing seemed to be quite a big deal, maybe there needs to be a lot of not-quite children anymore dying meaningless deaths for people to get really excited about the army.

outraged despairing spiteful online-venting britain is the yin to stoic plucky wry superior britain's yang

When I was growing up, the British Army were only occasionally killing Irishmen, that never excited the media too much. Then along cane Galtieri.

hey, that's royal wootton bassett to you son - the name was changed in 2011 in recognition of its role as a military cadaver sorting office xps

Wiltshire is the land of jingoism and forelock-grabbing - I spend Xmas there with a close friend whose Polish ex-POW dad was one of the few socialists in his town.

i apologise if my comments have disrespected royal wooton bassett, the military, the corpses which have travelled through the town, or the loyal subjects who gathered to watch the corpses

When I was at school you joined the Army and, if you were unlucky, got sent to Belfast. How much of a hoohah could you make about that?

aye, it's a much more exciting career now tom - if you're lucky you might get to go to the middle east on a modern-day crusade, and if you are horribly injured there's a decent chance your cutting-edge body armour will keep you alive so you can come home and appear in a help for heroes ad showing off your prosthetics

That's how the Sun editorial team sees it.

When I lived in San Diego I took the bus to UCSD each day, and almost every time there was also veterans taking the bus to the UCSD hospital, many of them on crutches, in wheelchairs. And the respect that they got was wonderful, with many many thank yous and people saying how grateful they was, and nobody ever complaining that the bus was almost always late because it took so long to get their wheelchairs on board, but I kinda kept thinking that perhaps there could be done something more helpful so wounded/disabled veterans wouldn't have to take the bus for an hour on their own to get healthcare?

that sounds suspiciously like socialism *narrows eyes*

fervent troop-supporters tend to support everything to help veterans apart from anything which might negatively impact on their own lives or finances

yeah i don't seem to see the same respect for disabled people in general nor the will to improve the crappy infrastructure that disables them

not technically the west but i've always felt like this should be a "developed nations" drift trend anyway:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437950/japans-new-fascism

(article is old, but i just read it for the first time today)

this is good:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/i-watched-a-populist-leader-rise-in-my-country-and-that-is-why-i-am-genuinely-worried-for-america/2016/12/27/6b4cf632-cc65-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html?utm_term=.fed868c01f85

I remember there being quite a lot of Japanese fascist thinkers I had to study. I think, like Paxton, that to describe japan as fascist in the 30s-40s is wrong. But that aspect of politics was/is certainly there and influential.

https://i.sli.mg/cCiEOa.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/28/theresa-may-fight-2020-election-plans-take-britain-european/

She thinks that's her big vote winner does she? LOL.

The Prime Minister is understood to be backing plans to “lift and shift” human rights enshrined in the European Convention and write them into UK law.

this was her idea for Brexit as well. to literally take current EU law and emboss it into the very living weft of UK jurisprudence. which isn't quite what people voted for this summer, was it?

i suspect the laws dealing w/ the permeability of borders will be more "shift" than "lift."

i really like the bit in the piece about Orban and Trump linked above where it says something that they both share is that they don't mind being hated - they thrive on it. 'Their two basic postures of “defending” and “triumphing” are impossible to perform without picking enemies.'

Can it finally be time for the Democratic Party to pick a few enemies? People who they don't mind being hated by? It's just so fundamentally lame when you see a 'leader' who tries to please everyone

lol i'm pretty sure there are some deplorables we can unearth

yes except establishment Dems are HORRIFIED to be hated by them, which was sniffed out instantly

seriously tho i think the trump coalition were mostly unified by feeling looked down upon and despised by the wealthier, better educated, woke democratic coalition

if only there were a famous historical figure the dem party could turn to for advice on being hated

obv the real dem coalition is very broad and includes people from various levels of wealth and religious faith but in the culture war it's the universities/media vs. the middle class and their vulgar outsider billionaire benefactor

i disagree

i think there was a hardcore of trump voters who were probably unified by that sort of resentment - there is a racist hard right that feels this way in almost every country, but "coalition" is a very very generous term to use

i think democrats need to pick sides now and go ahead and be hated by that group. you're nobody without good enemies.

this isn't really the thread for it i think (or maybe it is!) but i started noticing how every time ilx would discuss one of these culture wars locations they'd dismiss them as manufactured outrage, exaggerations, misrepresentations, etc, but then i'd see all these right-wing acquaintances post about them as tho they were real. i thought on the merits the right-wing case against transexual bathrooms was incomprehensibly dumb but then i'd see republicans get actually worked up about the topic so obv they were real to someone. it really feels like this election (which i've been trying not to discuss but it's very hard) was kinda more like the 2000 election. the economy is doing not terrible actually, we don't have a particularly pressing foreign entanglement, so there was a luxury to fall back on the culture wars.

like i think this is why evangelicals went so hard for trump. they thought the dem party and hillary in particular was anathema to their values and trump at least paid lip service to their faith. i do think she would've gotten some mileage out of talking about religion more outspokenly but i guess it's not really in her personality. they feel hated by us, i think. and then the nativist / white nationalist group which is probably larger than we think. in the end who did the republicans lose? maybe some neocons in new york like kristol and goldberg.

this is definitely not the thread for any of that nonsense

I believe we might need a new thread separate from this one and the Trump / rolling politics thread(s), a Rolling Geopolitics As We Know It Into The Shitbin Thread if you will

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/01/trump-endorses-american-geopolitical-suicide

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/01/15/the-real-reason-the-us-supports-nato-and-the-eu/

obviously would prefer to not have to start it until after the inauguration, as one does

I'd be worried if Trump wasn't trying to undermine the EU, tbh. They need to work against him on Iran, Israel and broader Middle-East policy, China, climate change, the status of post-Brexit Britain, etc, etc. If they aren't going to try to reposition the EU as an alternate pole of political (and, if you like, moral) influence vs a neo-Fash US then there isn't much point in attempting to have any say on the wider world at all.

The gamble would be that Gove/Farage and Trump palling it up, and the ongoing trash fire of contemporary US politics, doesn't have the exact opposite effect. Trump was toxic in Europe before the election (something like 9% approval) and is likely to get more toxic as time goes on. In a best-case scenario, people look at Brexit and Trump, think there for but for the grace of god, and head in the opposite direction. In reality, it seems more likely that 'mainstream' parties look to incorporate Trump-lite domestic policy into their platforms (as Fillon seems to be doing) while defending the EU and its influence to the hilt.

any thoughts on this

Most people in this country, certainly most members of the political class and especially its expression in Washington, don't realize what Donald Trump is trying to do in Europe and Russia. Back in December I explained that Trump has a plan to break up the European Union. Trump and his key advisor Steve Bannon (former Breitbart chief) believe they can promise an advantageous trade agreement with the United Kingdom, thus strengthening the UK's position in its negotiations over exiting the EU. With such a deal in place with the UK, they believe they can slice apart the EU by offering the same model deal to individual EU states. Steve Bannon discussed all of this at length with Business Week's Josh Green and Josh and I discussed it in great detail in this episode of my podcast from mid-December.

...Today in a new interview with the Germany's Bild and the Times of London Trump expanded on these goals dramatically. Trump leveled a series of attacks on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, suggesting he'd like to see her defeated for reelection and saying she'd hurt Germany by letting "all these illegals" into the country. Trump also called NATO "obsolete", predicted other countries would soon leave the EU, and characterized the EU itself as "basically a vehicle for Germany."

Trump and Bannon are extremely hostile to Merkel and eager to see her lose. But what is increasingly clear is that Trump will make the break up of the EU a central administration policy and appears to want the same for NATO.

My own view is that Trump and Bannon greatly overestimate America's relative economic power in the world. Their view appears to be that no European country will feel it is able to be locked out of trade with a US-UK trade pact. An America eager to break up the EU seems more likely to inject new life into the union. However that may be, Trump and Bannon clearly want to create a nativist world order based on the US, Russia and states that want to align with them. The EU and NATO are only obstacles to that goal.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-s-and-putin-s-plan-to-dissolve-the-eu-and-nato

However that may be, Trump and Bannon clearly want to create a nativist world order based on the US, Russia and states that want to align with them. The EU and NATO are only obstacles to that goal.

Sounds about right.

LOL @ this tho:

Trump wants to empower Farage as its interlocutor with the United Kingdom. Given Farage's fringe status in the UK, on its face that seems crazy. But that is the plan. And it is a sign of how potent Farage's guidance and advice has become for Trump's view of Europe, the EU and Russia.

lol at the idea that Farage's view aligns with Trump's, or lol that he has fringe status? i'm not very knowledgeable about farage, beyond the basics.

LOL @ the idea that Nigel Farage has any actual political power and influence in the UK.

did you hear that the uk has voted to become independent

So does Bannon want to re-do world war 2 and cobble together a nativist US-UK-French-Russian alliance against Germany?

but you'll never guess the twist!

i don't think the part you excerpted claims that farage has much power and influence - it describes him as having "fringe status in the UK", and then says that nonetheless his guidance and advice is "potent" for Trump's views. but it is pretty sloppily written, so who knows.

xpost

it says he has influence over trump. this is indeed lol from a certain extremely detached perspective.

I was LOLing @ Trump's Farage, as opposed to the puny reality.

My own view is that Trump and Bannon greatly overestimate America's relative economic power in the world. Their view appears to be that no European country will feel it is able to be locked out of trade with a US-UK trade pact. An America eager to break up the EU seems more likely to inject new life into the union.

All of that sounds reasonable to me except this last bit which sounds like wishful thinking.

Yes. A US-UK trade pact that works equally well for both parties also seems like wishful thinking, on the part of whoever in the UK supports the idea.

The bigger issue is that Trump is confused about whose interests NATO and the EU serve but the idea that European nations, especially ones dealing w/ their own right-wing insurrections, would not be interested in following the US' lead is kinda silly once you understand why these institutions were developed in the first place. Trump likes to complain that Europe doesn't pay enough for its own defense + military but doesn't understand that was built in as a feature, not a bug. We wanted dependents.

Brownie points for the first pundit to call any US-UK arrangement 'you-suck'.

Here we go again: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/angela-merkel-replaces-hillary-clinton-as-target-of-fake-news/

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/donald-trumps-topsy-turvy-world/

If the difference between Clinton and Trump was one between liberal establishment and Rightist populist rage, this difference has shrunk to a minimum in the case of le Pen versus Fillon. Although both are cultural conservatives, in matters of economy Fillon is a pure neoliberal, while Le Pen is much more oriented towards protecting workers’ interests. In short, since Fillon stands for the worst combination around today – economic neoliberalism and social conservativism -, one is seriously tempted to prefer Le Pen.

give me one good reason france isn't going to elect le pen

seems likely to me

because +50% of French voters aren't going to vote for her

http://www.france24.com/en/20170116-pro-eu-macron-surges-french-election-polls-france

If Theresa May can keep up the good work maybe Macron can surprise us all.

Macron basically stand for economic neoliberalism and social liberalism doesn't he? that doesn't necessarily seem like a slam dunk as an election winning stance in 2017 either

and pro-EU but he makes motions towards limiting immigration responsibly but why vote for the immigration restriction lite when you can get the real thing

Maybe most people don't want heavy duty limits on immigration?

Ségolène Royal has explicitly backed Macron (said he's the only candidate "of the left" who can win, though Macron describes himself as neither left nor right), and some ppl seem to be speculating that Hollande might do the same? don't know if that would be a help or a hindrance to Macron

Yes, I think Hollande would do well to stay out of it tbh.

Mordy are you trying to become the Frederik B of French politics on ILX?

I don't think so. The United States has a president, who, for all that leftists dislike him, is probably the most left-wing President since the 1970s. In England, the Conservative majority will be smaller than the center-right Conservative-LD coalition that was in charge before, and my sense is that the massive swing from Scottish Labour to SNP is in no way a move to the right. In Canada, NDP just took over one of the most conservative provinces in the country, and Liberals are polling way better than they were back in 2011 when Harper won his current majority; I don't think people are projecting he'll keep that majority in the upcoming election. I don't know much about Australia or France.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 8 May 2015 17:26 (one year ago) Permalink

david bowie was still alive, etc.

xp how so?

I think some drift happened between then and now and I think people overstate the extent to which it's happened now but yes, overall, I would cahnge my answer at this point

I just meant that you speak very confidently about the national politics of a place you don't live, on a board where other people do live there, and do not share your confidence.

i think you misread my comment. i was sincerely asking for some good reasons why she won't win in light of these broader trends. note that the italics came from zizek, not from myself. i'm certainly not an expert on french politics and if you told me something like "france's history of left-wing revolutionary activity insulates it against the generally right-wing shift occurring in the West" i would probably believe you. but i'm more seeing things like that zizek article that posits that hollande v. marie le pen will shape up into a disaster, or caldwell on calais, or paris, which paints a pretty dystopian picture. nb that caldwell makes the pt that the very ppl who are insulated from the trends that are pushing a right-wing shift in france are ppl like you - members of the upper educated crust who are being catered by the new paris economy. whereas the right-wing voters are much like our trump voters - neither too poor or too rich, middle class and feeling squeezed out of the political social life of france. anyway, i disagree about the problem w/ fred b - it's not that he has opinions about American political life that Americans don't share (if that was it who would care - we clearly don't know shit about American politics even though we live here). it's that he's so fervent about his opinions and his remedies and solutions. i have no idea how to fix european right-wingism. that's like the very essence of this thread. is there a drift and if there is, why is it happening. not "there def is a drift" (tho tpbh there is) and "it's happening bc france isn't accommodating enough to immigrants" - that kind of didactic self-confidence being imho the ultimate issue w/ fredism.

also if i can toot my own horn i started this thread b4 brexit & trump so maybe despite as intimate a relationship to french politics as you might have, i may be able to notice broader trends that are worth considering. even if you feel like le pen can't possibly win - i thought trump couldn't possibly win. and i had written this before the election:

bump.

fingers crossed i don't have to bump this thread again in nov.

― Mordy, Friday, June 24, 2016 10:17 AM (six months ago)

I sincerely don't know who the author of that piece is, Zizek, though I've seen the name on ILX before; but I read over it and saw this:

"Now that Fillon was elected to be the Right’s candidate in the forthcoming French presidential elections, and with the (almost full) certainty that, in the second round of the elections, the choice will be between Fillon and Marine Le Pen, our democracy has reached its (till now) lowest point."

and I wonder what sense of "certainty" is at play here? for the situation is quite fluid. obv that runoff is a possibility but certainty? it's hard to take the article seriously...except as wish-fulfillment?

I don't know who Caldwell is either!

I live in ground zero of the Parisian migrant crisis---I can see a group of them looking out my window as I write this post---and am only insulated from the crisis inasmuch as I am a civil servant here. but I wait in the same immigration queues as all other immigrants, deal with the same opacity of process, experience the same indifference of the state toward our transiency.

French right-wing-ism is a reply to immigration. was there ever a time when immigrants have been welcomed by "the people", here or anywhere? Not in the America I know: my father was an immigrant to the USA in the 1960s and there were no lamps beside golden doors.

Mordy, if you only saw this right wing drift in 2015, 15 years after the Jörg Haider sanctions and 14 years after the populists came to power in Denmark, I don't think that's anything to brag about.

No idea Zizek lived in France tbh.

i think comparing the current immigration crisis to previous hostility to immigration is a mistake. it seems different to me in kind + scale. for one, it's a very large group of people, coming over in a very short period of time, w/ radically different ideological + theological views from the countries to which they are immigrating, in the midst of ongoing large scale terror attacks by nominal [even if unfairly associated] coreligionists, and then w/ the added crisis of a total failure to assimilate them into the broader society - instead shoveling them out to banlieues. this is a vastly different situation than, say, immigration of latinos to the US who share the same religion, european language speakers, at least partial european descent, and social structure that looks a lot like america of 50 years ago. ie not a clash of civilizations in any kind of reasonable way.

zizek is a pop star continental philosopher who is often wrong or silly but sometimes has fairly insightful things to say. i'm not sure what you see as the wishful thinking in his article there. it's possibly to read out some kind of minor sympathy w/ le pen + right-wing populism (the closest he goes to stepping over this line is singing the social safety net praises of the current Polish gov) but he immediately repudiates it (on the basis of its xenophobia) and i think sees this more as just being a self-evident rhyme w/ these other dynamics playing out. ultimately after brexit and trump i think any one who looks at any election at the moment and writes off an anti-immigrant, anti-neoliberalism candidate for being too right-wing is not paying v good attention? like i wrote above, if france is somehow different culturally then that's the kind of answer i was trying to solicit. not sure that the idea that macron is going to come and save the day is particularly reasonable (i mean it might be true, but if we're talking about wishful thinking we should probably start here).

and lol fred i can't get hit twice in the same conversation for predicting too much right-wing drift when the evidence doesn't support it /and/ not predicting it soon enough

Can I then hit you on speaking very didactically and self-confident on immigration to France without mentioning colonialism and the Algerian War?

There's definitely a populist drift, btw. And that should have been clear to everyone for decades, and mostly was, at least in Europe. But whether or not that should be called a 'right wing drift' and include stuff like the conservatives winning the 2015 election is up for debate, imo.

Wish-fulfillment inasmuch there'd be some "charge" in seeing Le Pen take it all. accelerationism, is that what it's called?

Catholics were by no means welcomed to the USA as coreligionists.

I don't mean to say that I see the way forward for France, not at all.

no, bc you're confused [as per usual]. what does colonialism and the Algerian War have to do w/ what we're discussing? even if the conditions that led to the current crisis is 100% entirely France's fault, that does not change the actual implications today. you can't convince people to vote for the person you prefer by telling them that it's their fault in the first place. xp

iow

"massive islamic immigration to europe is freaking out europeans and pushing them to vote for more right-wing parties"
"you didn't mention colonialism"

^ this is a non-sequitar

Zizek is a troll not worthy of serious consideration

xp

x-post: Quite a lot of the islamic immigration went to France because of colonialist past, just as England got a lot of Caribbean immigration. It's extremely important. But you seem to speak of it as if immigration is a recent development: 'a very large group of people, coming over in a very short period of time [...] in the midst of ongoing large scale terror attacks by nominal [even if unfairly associated] coreligionists'. It's kinda not.

yes you are correct, immigration has been happening for a while and only recently sped up. do u know how tedious it is talking to u.

Why do you say it sped up?

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/08/PGM_2016.08.02_Europe-Asylum-01.png

obv this would be even more dramatic if it included data from 2016 as well

http://i67.tinypic.com/alsro2.png

That's refugees, not immigrants. And btw, most indicators I've seen says that it has tapered off in 2016, it was some quite specific circumstances that led to that shameful crisis. I can assure you, the populist drift in Europe did not begin with the Syrian war.

idk you might find a lot of interesting data here that might force you to complicate your narrative that the current immigration situation in europe is comparable + within the same continuum as french colonization of algeria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis

What's the point you are trying to make Fred, other than being contrarian for the sake of it?

you hear a lot of white Brits on the BBC news saying "there's too many immigrants but i have no issue with refugees and i clearly recognise the difference between the two categories" tbf

To what extent has Macron been successful in presenting himself as a break with the past, rather than a defender of the status quo, as has been the problem with Clinton and other centrists?

In general 'sensible' neoliberal centrists have not done too well against neofascist populists but if Macron can adequately distance himself from the rest of the political class then that might help. I'd still like to believe that enough of the French electorate will vote for anyone but Le Pen, but I'm not confident.

That's refugees, not immigrants.

refugees are a type of immigrant btw

At the moment I'm trying to figure out what on earth Mordy is talking about, as it's really hard to know how to respond without knowing that. It's really really vague and most of what he is saying doesn't really fit together. Because yeah, it matters whether we are discussing the specific situation of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, which clearly hasn't shown it's full impact in European politics so far - and will probably impact Germany more than France? - or whether we're discussing the populist drift over the last few decades, which covers much more of the history of LePen and Front National.

If your argument with this thread is that the right wing drift is not new (and consequently has nothing to do w recent trends) then just say that. I don't think I've written anything complicated here and you can go back through the thread and see plenty of what I consider examples of this trend. I think an honest reading of the last few decades does suggest a new phenomenon at the moment but you're entitled to dig deeper for its roots as far back as you'd like to go.

need to start from that point when Western democracies were really left wing

Like can it both be true that EU skepticism and bilateral skepticism is on the rise while skepticism has always existed? Maybe we should be discussing boiling points acc to you but if you don't think Brexit and Trump are a break with recent history I mean that's a bit myopic no?

tbh, I think with the benefit of hindsight there are probably significant stretches of recent British history when Brexit could potentially have won had anyone been daft enough to put it to a referendum. The press-led hostility to the European Union has been present for decades.

Also I'm kind of lol'ing at Mordy going from 'no no, I just ask questions, I don't pretend to know with confidence' to 'here's some wikipedia numbers that show you're wrong about the area where you live' in an hour and a half...

And I do value your opinion as an outsider, Mordy. I really do. But when you're ussplaining the recent refugee crisis, and doesn't use the word 'refugee' once, it's not really my fault that the discussion becomes tedious. How was I supposed to know which immigrant crisis you were talking about?

If you're discussing immigration and Brexit, then that's Eastern European immigration, ie. Christians, and terror doesn't really play into it. If you want to discuss the upcoming German election with immigration, then yup, the refugee crisis is probably the most important thing. Ditto Sweden, I'd wager, for specific historical reasons (Syrian immigration has historically been so large that Syrianska FC has played in the top tier football league since 2010, and a lot of new refugees went to places they knew to be welcoming already). But it's different all over Europe, and so much of it is connected to much larger historical reasons.

Fred I think you're very confused about my arguments in this thread. I said I can't say with confidence who will win the French elections.

If you're discussing immigration and Brexit, then that's Eastern European immigration, ie. Christians, and terror doesn't really play into it

yeah this isn't entirely true. there is definitely an anti-syrian refugee tendency in britain which informs some of the brexiteers thought. "britain will be able to better control its borders when it leaves the eu, germany has taken in too many syrian refugees" etc.

Shit I'm sorry, Syrianska got relegated in 2014. Oh well, hopefully they've gotten a new influx of talent.

i.e. https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/812553447035834368

i didn't realize that the idea that europe was experiencing an immigration crisis that was emboldening the right-wing was even controversial tbh! i feel like it has been the main story of the last 2 years. otoh i'm not sure if that's even what fred is taking exception with. so.

To what extent has Macron been successful in presenting himself as a break with the past, rather than a defender of the status quo, as has been the problem with Clinton and other centrists?

I've seen it argued that Macron's centrist/third-way positioning is convincingly a break with the past in a French context, in as much as the French Socialist Party never quite reformed itself into a pro-free market party the way most of its counterparts in other western countries did? though I remember people saying the same thing about Renzi and the Italian left.

with the admission upfront that i don't know enough about french politics to give a definitive opinion on this-- isn't "third-way" centrism the very thing that left-wing political orgs (Clinton Dems, Blair Labour, etc) have attributed their continuing failures to? why would such an ideological position be a boon in france and not a major disqualification?

well if the argument that soref is bringing up is correct it may be the fact that it offers change in france, whereas in other countries where pasokification and the failure of liberal centrism has occurred it's because it became the status quo and people wanted a rupture

isn't hollande the status quo and isn't he just another face of modern capitalist neoliberalism (and internationalism lite)?

like a big talking pt in the US elections were that Clinton/Bush were two sides of the same thing - a consensus about international trade agreements, neoliberalism, free marketism, etc, with mainly cosmetic differences. that sounds applicable here as well.

ussplaining

also guys i think it's ok for ppl from other countries to talk about different countries and even to argue with ppl from those countries at times. if someone from denmark had kept telling ilx that trump was going to win we certainly would've gotten annoyed and ppl might've told them to shut up based on their being from denmark, but ultimately they would've been right and US ILX would've been wrong. just do it w/ a little humility and don't browbeat people with the same arguments over and over again. also there's a big difference between making ongoing moral arguments attached to a political narrative and amoral forecasting/interpretation. the former rubs ppl the wrong way whether you're from a different country or not. that's i think what annoys ppl about fred - not that he's not from the US but is interested in US politics. it's that he's annoying a good % of the time in politics threads and that he's not from the US is a convenient way to mock him but unrelated to the fundamental problems w/ his posting style.

Hey, he's still here you know.

"he hasn't gone away you know"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38549000/jpg/_38549447_adams_bbc_238.jpg

I'm actually really glad you're saying that Mordy. I'm not going to stop talking about morality, btw, but I do agree that most of the hate thrown my way was xenophobic nonsense ;) I'm kinda upset that you ruined my chance for a good response to Shakey, but oh well.

Maybe something about reading comprehension too

why start now

i think you misread my comment. i was sincerely asking for some good reasons why she won't win in light of these broader trends

I think the problem is that you're reading this situation through the lens of broader trends instead of numbers

france is absolutely part of this western right wing drift, and le pen is part of that. but she is still nowhere close to getting 50% of france to vote for her + and unlike america, france is a place where you do actually have to get 50% of the population to vote for you. that's kinda the beginning and end of it.

yeah I worry about "the numbers" polls post Trump brexit but I don't see her support having risen enough since the crisis to take the pie. And I think her having been on the scene so long plays against her, like she's not really "change" either, she's another well-known electoral retread. That seems to be a main thing in Macron's favor right now.

Finns Party tanking in the polls having joined the government:

http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finns_party_popularity_slumps_to_seven-year_low/9416414

france is absolutely part of this western right wing drift, and le pen is part of that. but she is still nowhere close to getting 50% of france to vote for her + and unlike america, france is a place where you do actually have to get 50% of the population to vote for you. that's kinda the beginning and end of it.

Well not exactly. What you need is 50% of the population who vote. And the reason why I'm not very optimistic about our election is that there seems to be a lot of people who are no longer involved in politics, who feel left out and disgusted. And these people will either vote for Le Pen out of spite or simply will not bother to show up. If you look at young people especially, a lot of them do not vote at all and amongst the ones who do vote a majority vote for Le Pen. Before Fillon won the primary I've seen a lot of people saying that if it came down to Le Pen versus Sarkozy (as FN vs LR was and still is the most likely scenario, given how bad the PS and left are doing) they wouldn't bother because it's pretty much the same thing. Sarkozy is out but Fillon isn't that much better (might actually be worse) so that issue remains. Low turnout could lead to Le Pen being elected. I wouldn't say it's very likely but I'm not as confident as I would have been 10 years ago.

Do you mean people who don't even like Le Pen will vote for her out of spite?

Obviously they're a minority but there are people like that for sure. "I don't like her ideas but I don't like the others either so I will vote for her just to fuck with them/the elites/the media". I know people IRL who say that. It's very possible of course that they do actually like her ideas but won't admit it so they're trying to frame it differently.

And that's nothing new, of course. There's always been people like that, from as long as I remember. But people seem to be more and more disgusted by "traditional" politics.

It's strange who gets considered part of the elites. According to Yahoo UK commenters even minor celebrities live in "ivory towers".

Finns Party tanking in the polls having joined the government:

http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finns_party_popularity_slumps_to_seven-year_low/9416414

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), 21. januar 2017 14:08 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is key. The same thing happened to the Norwegian Fremskridtsparti when they joined the government. In Denmark, where the DPP is the biggest right-wing party now, they're still doing everything they can to avoid joining the government and taking responsibility. Of course it's different in first-past-the-post systems, but in most countries with parliamental models such as in Sweden and Denmark, I've felt for a long time it would do more good to oppose the populists every step of the way, and if they really win enough votes to govern, let them govern. The real problem comes when the left starts copying their faulty solutions, it just allows them to move further right, and keep on having power without responsibility.

In a German beerhall today:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2sOHGJWIAAiwSX.jpg

somehow the traditional parties of the left have been stuck holding the can for the ravages of global neoliberalism. htf did that happen??

the fact that we've allowed the right to claim they're the ones who will stick up for the little guy in an uncaring world is just fucking preposterous

otm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38718286

so fucking stupid. might as well hand it to wilders now

Yep. He's trying to 'toughen up' his party to snatch Wilders votes. Instead left and right are roasting him right now. Rightfully so. And good that it takes a new fucking election to make him finally admit he thinks only white people can be Dutch.

The only good thing I can see coming from this is that the world better understands that our PM is a blackface loving, clueless-and-proud, post-vision-and-proud wanker.

dean baker implicitly chides me for contending that it's 'globalization' that has left workers in france and italy mad about ting:

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/it-s-austerity-not-globalization-that-is-making-workers-in-france-and-italy-unhappy

always good to be reminded that the forces of neoliberalism are not 'impersonal' (though it may feel like that) - they're the consequence of deliberate action taken by policymakers

i am happy about hamon. valls' statement could have been written by blairbots:

“There is now a very clear choice between certain defeat and possible victory, between unachievable promises and a credible left that takes responsibility"

among hamon's proposals: UBI, taxing robots, legal weed.

Christ, they really are shallow enough to think a mid-price suit and an NLP course will take them to power

they think it's still 1998

Just worked over here didn't it

Heyoooo

NLP = "tap 'em on the pussy" ?

That's more or less what the guy from Whitehouse was promising from his NLP course.

my problem with Hamon is that mentions of him remind me of this guy

http://img.20mn.fr/jHaz7H3NT8q73KEliE5n_w/2048x1536-fit_john-hamon-john-hamon.jpg

whose posters appear irregularly all over Paris. though I dunno, maybe that's why people voted for Hamon!

i feel bad for singling out the more headline-grabbing of hamon's proposals - he does have a lot of thought-through policies. but even the eccentric stuff is not that eccentric, and the left needs policies that cut through (i.e. fight for 15, etc)

also he was foursquare against any form of burkini ban and valls was for it so fuck valls forever honestly. that position should dog him to his grave.

i may have just heard this incorrectly on the radio but i think valls has said hamon will increase the likelihood of successful terrorist attacks against France.

lol at Fillon's wife getting paid a cool half mil for just being his wife. I'm not surprised, exactly. But it's an indicator of just how entitled and above the law these people think they are (and they're mainly right about this!) They really do think they're masters of the universe.

Hope to god this 1) Opens the race up 2) Does not swing support to Le Pen. These may be incompatible wishes.

i may have just heard this incorrectly on the radio but i think valls has said hamon will increase the likelihood of successful terrorist attacks against France.

I don't know if he actually said that but he and his side have been made not-so-subtle hints at this, calling Hamon an Islamo-leftist ("islamo-gauchiste").

*have made

"getting paid a cool half mil"

Never understood what "cool" means when people are talking about money. Surely it can't just mean that it's cool to have lots of money.

'cool' draws attention both to the amount and the casualness with which it has been dealt with imo

-with

it's only half a million euros - no big deal

what exactly is the FN position on taxing the rich?

from wiki:

Marine Le Pen denounces the current corporate tax as "a crying injustice". She claims that the main groups of CAC 40 only pay 8% of corporate tax whereas the small offices/home offices, the small and medium enterprises, the craftsmen and the shopkeepers fully pay 33.33%. She advocates to implement a flexible corporate tax according to the use of profits: heavier when the profits benefit the shareholders and lighter when the profits turn towards profit sharing, salaries, employment and productive investment, enabling a relocation of activities.[237]

from bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-20/the-far-left-economics-of-frances-far-right

Le Pen says France has been “left alone, naked” to face unchecked globalization. She wants France to leave the European Union and pull out of the euro currency so it can keep tight controls on imports while devaluing its currency “to relaunch exports and employment.” The FN platform calls for a 3 percent tax on all imports that would be used to give a €200 ($270) monthly bonus to the country’s lowest-paid workers.

She also wants the government to play a stronger role in managing the economy—for example, by temporarily nationalizing banks and forcing them to “clean up” their practices. “We still believe in free markets,” she says. “The danger is ultra-liberalism, where financial markets impose all the rules.”

While Hollande has been raising taxes in an effort to narrow the budget deficit, the FN’s economic platform is packed with expensive crowd-pleasers, such as a 20 percent cut in the gas tax and a lowering of the standard retirement age to 60. (Then-President Nicolas Sarkozy of the center-right raised it to 62 only three years ago.) Le Pen says the government can save money by cutting waste, ending social benefits for immigrants, and eliminating payments to the EU.

She’s not an anti-tax campaigner, though. “I am for a social protection system, à la française,” she says. “In this country we are willing to pay a certain level of taxes in order to assure a certain standard of living.”

Standard issue stuff for fascist parties until they actually get in power.

https://s29.postimg.org/ij487u1xz/image.png

thx Douglas Murray

One of the BBC's favourite go-to pundits of course.

Yes, along with Fraser Nelson.

And that woman from the Taxpayers Alliance.

various Labour figures are also associated with Murray via the Henry Jackson Society (of which hey is associate director):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/20/labour-cut-ties-henry-jackson-society

It wasn't so much integration that Murray wanted to talk about, however, but skin colour:

"We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. 'Get over it. It's nothing new. You're terrible. You're nothing'."

I knew Murray had bad opinions, but I hadn't quite realised that he's a full-on "white genocide" type

He's a full-on scumbag.

That Spectator piece by Murray is something else... Don't know where to begin.

Yet this time, there was a response to the rebuff. A new party — Forum for Democracy — arose out of the plebiscite. Led by one of Holland’s smartest and most prominent young intellectuals, Thierry Baudet,

Pour one out, I died laughing at "smartest and most prominent young intellectual".

Murray conveniently leaves out that Wilders has already had a seat at the table, supporting a minority cabinet. But he wasted his opportunity, retrieved support, the cabinet fell, and now no-one wants to govern with him anymore because he's proven to be deeply untrustworthy.

I'm not saying he won't be the biggest party (though he has lost four elections in a row up till now, mind) this time around. But Murray only pushes him more into the 'anti-establishment' position Wilders revels in. Together with two others, he's been in parliament the longest of all pm's: 18 years. That's how 'anti-establishment' and 'anti-elite' he is.

"smartest and most prominent young intellectuals"

This is so obviously how Murray sees himself.

Baudet is a querulant, who's biggest claim to fame to date is writing an atrociously bad novel, and promoting the work of those so-called 'pick up masters' (like Tom Cruise in Magnolia), saying "no doesn't mean no: women want to be overpowered".

douglas murray: proof that white genocide must happen, and soon

A couple more weeks like this one and I'll ... go see if there's a Kickstarter I can fund.

let us know, i'll set aside some cash now

16 days until the next big milestone in the West's march to the right - how are geert's odds looking?

Famous last words, but with all the hype about Wilders, I thought he would be polling 30-35% or something like that. He is at 13% in the last poll I saw. That's less than what the DPP gets in Denmark. Is there anything about the Dutch election system I have missed, or is he pretty far from winning?

If Wilders gets as low as 13% then I'm a Dutchman. But here's hoping.

Can't blame you for thinking that. But he's far from winning. He'll likely end up with 15% tops of the vote. His 'party' lost four times in a row. Everyone seems to forget this, all the time.

Not downplaying it, still way too many people voting for him, but he'll be no factor in forming a government. And I hope both national and international media will finally pay attention and stop giving him this ludicrous amount of coverage, because he's simply not as big a danger as is made out to be. He did a p good job at marginalizing himself this campaign, too, tbh.

(He's definitely left a mark on this country, making the center and right parties move more to the right, but that's a different story)

Honestly, I feel as if this won't end until the populists gets responsibility to do as they say, and fail miserably. That's what happened in Norway. The worst thing that happens is that all the other parties, spooked by the populist right, begins copying their politics with a 'respectable' sheen. In Denmark we have had 16 years and counting of populist immigration policy, and it's done fuck all to any problems. But the DPP won't go into government, even though they now are the biggest party on the right, so they still have a position where they get all the praise for being 'realists' on immigration, and everyone else gets the blame for all the shit they support.

It's exactly the same here. The Christian democrats (CDA) and conservatives (VVD) have shifted to the right a lot, copying slanderous words about refugees Wilders used four years ago. 'Respectable sheen' indeed... Like the DPP I think (but very different from Le Pen) Wilders simply does not want to govern. He doesn't want to be prime minister, because he'll have all to lose. He all but admits it when pushed on this.

It might be because France is a presidential system and Holland/Denmark are parliamental?