Daily Archives: February 6, 2021

The GameStop saga, for all the havoc it has caused to the global markets, is not just a tale of idealistic individual investors humiliating a bunch of arrogant hedge funds even if the tides turned on Tuesday, with a plunge in GameStops shares. For one, it feels like an unannounced sequel to the 6 January riots on Capitol Hill: both have featured a horde of angry, foul-mouthed social media addicts laying siege to the most sacred institutions of the deeply despised establishment.

However, while the Washington rioters were universally condemned, those leading the virtual crusade on Wall Street have fared much better. Having defended the stocks of musty, struggling companies against greedy hedge funds, they have garnered some sympathy across the political aisle.

The main lesson of the two riots, for the digital counterculture at least, seems clear. Today, the true shamans of the anti-establishment rebellion ought to master the arts of trading stock options and derivatives, not those of climbing walls and waving Confederate flags. The revolution may be livestreamed, tweeted and televised but its probably still a good idea to back up that Excel spreadsheet.

That the GameStop crusade seems dignified is partly a function of the hedge fund industrys rather controversial to put it mildly reputation. There is, however, another, less obvious reason for its acclaim in the public sphere: many of us are enchanted by the rhetoric of democratisation that has accompanied the rise of cheap online brokerage platforms.

One such platform Robinhood has provided the crucial digital infrastructure behind the GameStop rebellion, allowing ordinary people to buy shares in companies for small amounts of cash on their phones. Its own mission, repeated by its founders almost ad nauseam over the past few years, has been to democratise finance.

At first, it may seem just a natural outgrowth of the lofty mission embraced by index funds like Vanguard in the early 1970s. Back then, the idea was to create safe financial instruments that would make it trivially easy and cheap for ordinary people to invest into the stock market without having to accumulate much insider knowledge or expertise.

Robinhood, however, doesnt fashion itself as just another boring and utterly forgettable brokerage firm from Wall Street. Rather, it wants to be seen as a revolutionary, disruptive force out of Silicon Valley. Being seen as just such a digital platform does wonders to ones valuation: the benchmark being Amazon, not some unknown mutual fund.

Robinhoods rhetoric of democratisation is thus to be seen in a somewhat different light. Its heritage points towards the likes of Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork rather than Vanguard or BlackRock. All these digital firms promised to democratise one thing or another transportation, accommodation, office space and to do it fast.

Soon, this nascent industry, with its sweet promise of democracy as a service, couldnt quite contain itself: the global quest for democratising dog walking, babysitting, juice making and laundry-folding was on. This was pursued with the help of venture capitalists and various institutional investors who, squeezed by the low-interest rate legacy of the global financial crisis, were increasingly out of ideas on where to park their money.

This, however, wasnt the whole story: the drive to democratise everything was also fuelled by such unflinching beacons of liberal democracy as the government of Saudi Arabia. By partnering with Japans SoftBank, it bankrolled this myth, pouring billions into the likes of Uber and WeWork.

This huge influx of money, combined with genuinely new business models that rendered certain previously chargeable services nominally free, created an illusion of progress and social mobility. Many digital platforms were either heavily subsidised by their deep-pocketed backers or charged nothing at all; the lost revenue was to be made up by monetising more advanced related services and user data.

The inevitable process of democratisation touted by all the platforms as evidence of their own socially progressive nature, was often the result of simple arithmetic. In cases like WeWork, the maths did not even add up. Whether Robinhood, which has now raised an extra $3.4bn, will be luckier remains to be seen.

For most of these companies, the sweet promises of democratisation have made such maths irrelevant, at least in the short term. This explains how the tech industry has emerged as the leading purveyor of populism around the globe.

This may seem an overstatement. While we tend to reserve the dreaded P word for the Bannons, the Orbns and the Erdoans of this world, can we think of Bezos or Zuckerberg and the stock-trading Robinhood army in those terms?

We can and we should. With everyones eyes fixed on Trump-style populism primitive, toxic, nativist we have completely missed the platforms role in the emergence of another, rather distinct type of populism: sophisticated, cosmopolitan, urbane. Originating in Silicon Valley, this platform populism has advanced by disrupting hidden, reactionary forces that stand in the way of progress and democratisation all by unleashing the powers of digital technologies.

Platform populism is propelled by the almost conspiratorial insistence that the world isnt what it seems. The incumbent firms taxis, hotels, hedge funds have changed the rules of the game in such a way as to favour their own interests. Only by disrupting them can one hope to harvest all the benefits made possible by digital technologies. To that end, the platforms promise to unleash the forces of capitalism in order to civilise these savage remnants of the earlier, pre-digital civilisation.

Much of the rigidity of the pre-digital incumbents is a result of the regulations imposed by democratic (even if capitalist) states. However, in the topsy-turvy universe of platform populism, resisting democratic regulations by subjecting them to the sustained economic pressure of capitalist competition is incontrovertible evidence of democratisation. Hence the resistance from some of them to legislation designed to get them to treat their gig economy workers as actual employees.

That much in the rhetoric of platform populism is fake and that its ultimate winners will be the likes of SoftBank and Saudi Arabia doesnt matter either. Platform populism, featuring no coherent political ideology of its own, is all about process, not outcomes. The goal is to prove that, for all the machinations of government bureaucrats with their pesky regulations, our individual agency is still alive and kicking. Its definitely not to deploy that agency to accomplish any particular long-term political agenda.

Thus, many of the angry crusaders taking on the hedge fund industry are certainly aware that their own gains are temporary and fleeting. But who could deny them the pleasure of reaffirming their own agency by sticking it to the man, all while knowing that the only long-term gains of this process would accrue to other hedge funds and asset managers, such as BlackRock, which is estimated to have made billions on the GamesStop rush? Far from deepening democracy, platform populism turns into a farcical yet highly profitable theatre performance.

Evgeny Morozov is the founder of the Syllabus, and the author of several books on technology and politics

Originally posted here:

Why the GameStop affair is a perfect example of 'platform populism' - The Guardian

Since shortly after the outbreak of Covid-19, two theories about the pandemics likely impact have been circulating. One lets call it the bread thesis maintains that the crisis will reinstate respect for seriousness and competence. It will remind everyone that the nations of the world are interdependent and that the politics of expertise puts food on the table and keeps the diners alive.

The other lets call it the circuses thesis suggests that, with borders tightening, economic and social turmoil exacerbating old inequalities and anger over lockdowns rising and being directed at elites, the pandemic will benefit populists stirring culture wars.

The big political question this decade will be which thesis is more accurate. Enter Michael Burleigh, a British historian and recently the inaugural Engelsberg Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. From his lectures in that post, Burleigh has composed Populism: Before and After the Pandemic. This slim book ranges across many of the subjects of his previous works 20th-century Germany, decolonisation and the Cold War, the decline of the West, the uses and abuses of history but concludes with reflections on Covid-19 and what comes next.

It sits at the juncture of three current publishing trends: globetrotting think-pieces on Covid-19 (Ivan Krastevs Is It Tomorrow Yet?, Fareed Zakarias Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, Slavoj ieks Pandemic!), populism explainers (Anne Applebaums Twilight of Democracy, Michael Sandels The Tyranny of Merit) and explorations of post-imperial identity (Sathnam Sangheras Empireland, Robert Tombss This Sovereign Isle). Readers looking to understand the transformations brought about by the virus should start with Krastevs effort, but Burleighs book is a spirited, readable and thought-provoking tour through the forces defining our age. Populism only gets to the pandemic in its pessimistic conclusion, a short epilogue that follows three discrete but interlocking essays.

[see also:The fall of the Roman republic is a warning about todays degenerate populists]

Burleigh begins with an account of the recent populist wave and how elite interests have ultimately become the progenitors and beneficiaries of movements purporting to rally the masses against the rich and powerful. The Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has written that populism is a thin ideology which can bind itself on to other political traditions (nationalism, socialism, conservatism, even liberalism) and Burleigh examines its many different international forms in that spirit, neither demonising populist support nor wrapping it up in sentimental odes to real people.

The second essay compares the post-imperial experiences of Britain and Russia. While Burleigh does not labour the parallels, he notes an important similarity. In both countries the carapace of empire obscured the nation underneath the Russian Soviet republic had no formal capital nor a communist party of its own, as England today has no parliament of its own and the retreat of empire is prompting new reckonings with that underlying identity.

The third essay takes in Poland, Hungary, China, South Africa, Britain and the US to show how history is being politicised in order to unify populations, or to divide them into rooted patriots wedded to myths versus elite cosmopolitan subversives. All of which resonates in the wake of the statue wars in 2020 and the storming of the Capitol in Washington, DC where the Confederate flag was held aloft within its walls for the first time ever.

Populism displays Burleighs eye for enlivening and memorable aperus, anecdotes and factoids. He compares the similarities between different forms of populism to the Habsburg jaw in portraiture, and Norman Englands supranational, Francophone aristocrats to Davos man in armour. The Chinese Communist Party, he informs us, once produced a boxed DVD set for its cadres on what Mikhail Gorbachev did wrong in the last days of the Soviet Union. By 2007, 20 years after Ronald Reagan abolished balanced reporting rules for broadcasters, 91 per cent of US radio stations had a conservative bias. Emmanuel Macron based his listening tour following the yellow vests protests of 2019 on a similar exercise by Pierre Poujade, the original French populist.

This mastery of the past helps with predicting the future. Burleigh sees Vladimir Putin, who, after a referendum last summer, can now stay in office until 2036, adopting a form of back-seat power akin to that of Deng Xiaoping in 1980s China. In the shortening of global supply chains due to the pandemic he sees similarities to the breakdown of large-scale tile and glass production in the late Roman empire. And in Brexit and the quandaries about Englishness he sees a risk that Britain will follow Russia in resolving its post-imperial identity by forging a new one defined sharply and antagonistically in opposition to Europe. That a bureaucratic dispute over vaccines between the EU and a post-Brexit Britain has so quickly degenerated into a culture war and merged with emotive debates about the future of the union lends weight to that argument.

[see also:The Big Squeeze: How financial populism sent the stock market on a wild ride]

All of which brings him out at the pandemic-era epilogue. Burleigh gives the case for the bread thesis ample space, citing the chaotic scenes after Indias populist prime minister Narendra Modi announced a national curfew with four hours notice, forcing millions of Indians to travel back to their home villages in scenes that resembled the chaos of partition in 1947. Such misgovernment, he notes, naming instances in Italy, Brazil, Britain, Russia and elsewhere, shows the limits of populist rule Donald Trumps election defeat being a prime example.

Yet the books conclusion sides with the circuses thesis. Culture wars are bubbling even during lockdowns. Protracted economic downturns will come when emergency fiscal support is pulled and bankruptcies and unemployment soar. Unlike after the financial crisis of 2008, there will be no popular patience with further austerity, writes Burleigh. Any signs that economic inequalities are not being addressed this time will not be so passively received He cites France, where a combination of previous socio-economic grievances, the economic blow of the pandemic, waning patience with lockdowns and a search for scapegoats could put Marine Le Pen back on track to attack Macron as the incarnated representative of the global rich exploiting the couches populaires. Recent events support this. The storming of the Capitol spoke to the enduring disruptiveness of Trumpism. The vaccine nationalism rising in Europe hardly augurs a new age of enlightened international cooperation. In France, a recent poll put a Macron-Le Pen run-off in next years presidential election at 52 per cent to 48.

The message of Populism is not entirely pessimistic. Burleigh argues for a more robust defence of liberal democracy, a confrontation with the forces of inequality and division, and a scepticism about the notion that we are slaves to historical precedent. But, as his compelling book argues on its detours through time and space, there is also a case for realism about what the coming period of turmoil might bring. Bread does not always beat circuses.

Populism: Before and After the PandemicMichael BurleighHurst, 10.99, 152pp

Link:

Populism in the pandemic age - New Statesman

The debate around the farm laws and the agitation to scrap them serves a copybook case for those studying politics of populism. History repeats itself, but it shouldnt be allowed to in such a grotesque manner. Right since Independence, the Congress party has always chosen safe ways over hard and politically courageous decisions. As the ruling party, it played to the gallery to avoid political reverses. As the opposition, it has always fished in troubled waters, riding piggyback on popular sentiments. For Indias GOP, low-hanging fruits have always proved to be too tempting to remember its long-term vision for the future of India!

The Congress partys populist politics has proved to be extremely costly to the nation. The three important issues that are routinely referred to as core issues of the BJP are a testimony to this. Regardless of the expressed constitutional mandate, successive Congress governments refrained from nullifying Article 370, enacting a common civil code and preventing the silent invasion of Bangladeshi infiltrators into Assam. While the Congress used all these three issues as a protective shield around its vote bank, they were in fact laying red carpets to multiple threats to the very unity and integrity of India.

An important factor common to these three issues was Muslims in India. Sadly, Congress leaders have viewed Muslims only from the perspective of losses and gains in elections. For them, Jammu and Kashmir was more of a Muslim-majority province and hence a showcase item to be cited as a living example of Indias commitment to secularism. The party was always hell-bent on exhibiting secularism than being truly secular. At the cost of J&Ks progress on the human development front, the Congress allowed secessionist elements to thrive under Article 370.

It turned a Nelsons eye to many things, from repeated terrorist attacks to injustice in Ladakh and from mindless corruption to denial of constitutional safeguards to women and marginalised communities there. The Shah Bano case was the pinnacle of its politics of populism through minority appeasement. Rajiv Gandhis decision to amend the Constitution in order to undo the impact of the Supreme Court judgment further emboldened obscurantist elements in the Muslim community. In effect, justice to Muslim women facing acute vulnerability due to the retrograde practice of triple talaq continued to remain a chimera. To secure its own vote bank, the Congress committed the sin of making the lives of Muslim women even more insecure. Similarly, the IMDT act enacted during former PM Indira Gandhis second tenure gave the illegal migration of Bangladeshis more fillip instead of preventing it.

Again, the example of Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, introduced by Rajiv Gandhi, is equally educative. Later, the TADA was used and abused but it continued as a law. During the investigations into the 1993 Mumbai blasts, this Act proved to be very effective. However, in the face of a campaign by certain sections in society, TADA came to be portrayed as an anti-minority law and hence the Narasimha Rao regime meekly gave in to the pressures and repealed the act. Later, when the Vajpayee government decided to bring the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2002, the NDA government was compelled to call a joint sessionsomething that happened only very few times in Indias parliamentary historyof both the Houses to get the law passed.

All these examples show how the Congress lacked courage of conviction in abiding by the guiding principles of the Constitution. Now, while actively supporting forces of manufactured unrest on the farm bills, the GOP and other opposition parties are doing a great disservice to parliamentary democracy. How can a group of a few hundred stubborn agitators pressurise the government to undo what Parliament has passed? If we allow this to happen, it would amount to stifling the voices emanating from the very temple of democracy! The government has been engaging with the agitators patiently and peacefully. It is time that the Congress and opposition parties shun populism and instead prepare the agitators so that wiser counsel prevails.

While doing so, they may do well in recalling what Edmund Burke had said almost 250 years ago: Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion. (Speech to the Electors of Bristol, November 3, 1774)

VinaySahasrabuddhe(vinays57@gmail.com)President, ICCR, andBJP Rajya Sabha MP

More:

The Congress Partys politics of populism - The New Indian Express

For those who flirted with parts of the ex-presidents populist message, there is a straightforward line of defense: While Trump obviously failed, real Trumpism was never tried.

The problem was the deeply flawed, unhinged and amoral champion of the populist cause, but not the cause itself, which continues to be relevant. As my AEI colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty writes, political conditions will continue to call for a Trumpist response for some time.

Trumps idiosyncrasies surely go a long way toward accounting for the wholesale failure of his policy agenda, as well as for his disgraceful departure from office. But conservatives have to confront the possibility that populism itself was an important component of the failureand indeed that any populist politics carries the seeds of policy failure.

The proposition will not sit easily with those who, in the wake of the Trump disaster, are seeking to rehabilitate the term. According to the American Compass Oren Cass, for example, theres a way in which populism also means taking seriously the concerns that people have, understanding that they will not all express them in the same terms a Beltway debate might.

But populism has a commonly agreed-upon definition: Namely, it is a type of politics that pits good and pure-hearted ordinary people against a self-serving, out-of-touch elite. As such, populism is inherently divisive as it singles out specific groups as distinct from the people (elites, immigrants, bankers, journalists). It is anti-pluralist as it treats the people as a homogenous entity. Finally, it has a penchant for authoritarianism: If one takes Trumps I am your voice seriously, why should there be any limits to the power of the presidency?

Moreover, through its Manichean nature, populism introduces passions into politicsas opposed to an interplay between interests and abstract principles. And passions are only rarely useful for threading the needle on public policy. In fact, if stirring passions becomes the aim of politics, policy outcomes take a back seat. Neither the border wall, nor the Muslim ban, nor any other of the ex-presidents signature policy ideas were instrumental to achieving any real-world objectives, such as helping those who helped to elect him. Instead, their sole purpose was to keep the audience engaged and emotionally invested in the populist spectacle.

Furthermore, the debate on the future role of populism within the Republican party ought not to be limited to lessons from the Trump era. The bigger picture is not an encouraging one. For every Israel under Benjamin Netanyahus leadership, there is a Hungary under Viktor Orbn, suffering from brain drain and dismantling its democratic institutionsor an India under Narendra Modi, gripped by social unrest and economic dysfunction.

In the GOP alone, recent manifestations go from Pat Buchanan through Sarah Palin and the Tea Party to Trump. Instead of yielding a governing strategy, the partys attempts to embrace populism were akin to efforts to ride a tigerbefore being eaten by it, like Eric Cantor or Lindsey Graham. Perhaps the tiger could be tamed, as the former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May hoped with her efforts to reshape the Tories as a party of responsible nationalismonly to see herself be overrun by ever more extreme fringes.

It should not be too much to ask those who wish to keep populism as a lasting hallmark of conservative and Republican politics to address populisms real-world record, instead of retreating to a purely abstract defense of politics that would supposedly take the concerns of working-class Americans more seriously than the Beltway elites. Yet, much like Soviet elites of the 1970s and the 1980s, who were not keen to defend the track record of real socialism, the high priests of populism today are keen to sell us a promise of an idealized populism to come, instead of accepting accountability for any of the mess that real populism of the past decade helped create.

There are important policy conversations to be had on the political rightand the leftabout subjects such as immigration or industrial policy. But with its appeal to passions and grievance, populism is the worst possible vehicle for policy change.

In Denmark, the left-of-center government of Mette Frederiksen is seeking without much ado to drive the number of asylum claims to zero, following years of restrictive immigration policy by Social Democrats. Any number of conservative, right-wing, or free-market-friendly governmentsnot least the Reagan administration in the United States or Margaret Thatchers government in the U.K.have provided assistance to specific industries or protected them from foreign competition. Whatever one thinks of the merits of such policies, populism and the pursuit of the substantive agenda advocated by those who want the GOP to be a party of the working class are perfectly separable.

If anything, populism makes thoughtful conversations on immigration, industrial policy, or social safety nets essentially impossible. On both sides of the Atlantic, the combination of the divisive us-versus-them rhetoric of populism on the political right with demands to curb immigration has been a surefire way to attract racists. And combining populism with an expansive view of the states role in the economy has been a one-way ticket to irresponsible, short-sighted economic policy mixesas the legacy of economic populism in Latin America demonstrates.

By all means, let us judge each policy idea on its merits and leave no stone unturned. Yet insofar as insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, to seek to perpetuate the GOPs populism in the wake of the Trump disaster would be positively insane.

Dalibor Rohac is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. Follow him on Twitter @DaliborRohac.

More here:

The Problems With Populism Go Well Beyond Donald Trump - The Dispatch

Just as the disastrous digestion process of the Brexit referendum has become the best vaccine against anti-EU populism, so could the assault on the US Capitol become the mirror in which populists in Europe and other parts of the world see their reflections from now on, each time they try to impose their discourse of delegitimising institutions.

Such an American impact would be nothing new. With all its problems and limitations, US democracy has always stood as a beacon for all people around the world who wished to live in freedom and equality under the rule of law. When the French people gave the American people the Statue of Liberty in 1886, marking the first centenary of US independence, it was not just a gesture of recognition, but also a conscious transferral of the flame of freedom for preservation in a safe place while the old continent waited for better times.

As its designer, sculptor Frdric Auguste Bartholdi, said to the promoter of the initiative, French jurist and politician douard Laboulaye, I will endeavour to glorify the Republic over there, until the day we rediscover it among ourselves. But, far from being glorified, the Republic came close to being lost.

Democracy is contagious, as is populism. Until now, the US populist contagion reaching Europe has run along two lines: an indirect one, based on imitation; and a direct one, stemming from cooperation, with support from the US, especially via the activism of Steve Bannon and the financing of Brexit and European far-right parties (see, for example, the establishment of US far-right movement QAnon in Germany, and the Trumpism of Spains Vox on George Soros).

These two types of influence have come together in the use of social media and alternative media, with the result that the followers of populist movements reinforce their sense of grievance with the system and immunise themselves against the facts.

The Washington riots will have a significant impact on the worst of the populists in our midst.

But, now we have seen a mob assaulting the US Congress, this could change. From now on, each time someone attempts to set themselves up as the sole spokesperson of the people, urges protesters to occupy institutions, undermines the role of the courts as supreme arbiters of the law, or conceals their defeats behind baseless claims of electoral fraud, everyone will know how the story ends: your country out of the European Union, a clown in disguise at the parliamentary platform, violence in the streets, institutions in disrepute, and an illiberal democracy with reduced rights.

From now on, citizens will understand much more clearly why it is said that democracies die bit by bit, until they suddenly succumb and it is too late; understand that they must take a stand against each small violation of institutional independence, demagogical outburst by their leaders, incendiary and hate-filled speeches by political representatives, imposter journalists, fake media outlets, and disinformation campaigns that nurture and encourage populists.

Undoubtedly, these effects will be felt on both sides of the political spectrum. Even though the Trump phenomenon can be likened to the nationalist populism of the far right, left-wing populisms are also populisms. And, in all likelihood, the population will sharpen its eyes and recognise that, though the issues are different (religion, immigration, or the economy), the methods for gaining power are the same.

Beyond empowering European democrats and weakening forces that aspire to take power by assault, the Washington riots, added to Trumps exit, will have a significant impact on the worst of the populists in our midst those who have already reached power in Poland and Hungary, bolstered by Trumps United States both as an example and in policy terms.

For other EU member states and their institutions, the events in Washington are an important reminder that, from the dawn of time, the heavens have been breached first by assaulting public institutions and undermining the rule of law. After all, the Statue of Liberty holds a torch in her right hand, and a tablet of laws in her left. There is no liberty outside the law, only within be it in Washington, Paris, or Warsaw.

The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of its individual authors.

Read more:

The other contagion: Why the US Capitol attack is a warning to populists - European Council on Foreign Relations