Category Archives: Populism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasing crime rates

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

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

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

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

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

Xenophobic nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashok Swain

@ashoswai

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

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

By STEVE PEOPLESAP National Politics Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He added, "Hopefully, people come together."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theodore Kupfer is an associate editor of City Journal.

Photo:Prostock-Studio/iStock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link:

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

Weve been hearing for years about how the U.S. two major political parties have realigned on economic issues, and the new breed of MAGA Republicans arent like the old corporate Reaganite Republicans. Theyre populists. Ive even heard the claim that, however conservative they may be on social issues, their economic views approximate those of democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Now, the House just passed a measure to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month. And yet the loudest MAGA-ites all voted against HR 6833the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Take a look at the roll call. Marjorie Taylor Greene voted nay. Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert? Nay, nay. Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz? Nay, nay, and nay.

You can argue that politicians of many different ideological hues are often corrupt (or simply insincere) and fail to live up to their crowd-pleasing rhetoric. And thats true. But these are supposed to be the hardest corethe GOPs equivalent of Bernie or the Squad. And they couldnt even vote to throw the tiniest bone to suffering people at the expense of corporate profits. (37.3 million Americans, or one in every 10 Americans, has diabetes, according to the CDC.)

The idea that the price of insulin is just being cappedrather than made free to those who need itsays depressing things about the level of resistance to more meaningful reform among our political elites. Medicare for All is supported by well over half of the American publicand a public option in healthcare is backed by an even bigger majority. The insulin issue is a perfect demonstration of why these proposals resonate with so many people.

Try to imagine this happening in other scenarios.

Imagine that before the police investigated death threats from a stalker, you had to pay a fee at the Police Departments reception desk. Or that when you stood on your front lawn watching your house burn down, the local fire captain approached you with a portable card reader so you could swipe or tap your debit card before he let his men take out their hoses and get to work. Would you be concerned with making these services more affordableor would you regard the very idea that they would be treated as commodities as a moral abomination?

Its a ludicrously tiny infringement on the Divine Right of Corporations to make as much money as all possible, at the expense of suffering people. That was too much for the MAGA populists.

You cant be denied entrance to an emergency room because of your inability to pay. (Youll just be bankrupted by the bill if you live.) You can, however, be denied life-saving insulin.

As of last August, there were 3,600 campaigns on GoFundMe that mentioned diabetes or insulin. In one disturbing case that went viral a couple of years ago, Shane Patrick Boyle died after falling $50 short in his GoFundMe effort to raise $750 to buy a month of insulin. He succumbed to diabetic ketoacidosis while rationing his last vial of insulin, which made his blood acidic. Its a horrendously painful way to die.

As conservatives never tire of pointing out, someone has to pay for free services. Yet when it comes to services ranging from fire protection to K-12 public schools, the moral calculation is its better for everyone to pay for them through progressive taxation. That means no one has to think about money when they call 9-1-1 or enroll their child in school. This concept has become so baked into how we understand what it is to live in a civilized society, that the very thought of charging for these things at the point of service sounds like the stuff of dystopian science fiction.

If that calculation should be applied to anything, it should be medicine. Charging a diabetic for their insulin is like charging someone on a future colony on the moon for their months supply of breathable air.

Given all that, its pathetic that the best President Joe Biden can do is push for a limit on how much people are shaken down for the privilege of continuing to draw breath. And it was telling that in the same State of the Union speech where he introduced the idea, he announced that new anti-viral treatments for COVID were going to be offered for free. COVID is a unique crisis and, thus, centrists are willing to situationally support Medicare for All. The 100,000 people who die every year of diabetes, though? That just feels like business as usual.

It's also worth noting that the Affordable Insulin Now Act wouldnt have saved Shane Patrick Boyle, who lost his benefits because hed moved across state lines to care for his ailing mother. It also wouldnt help many of the thousands of people currently raising money to pay for their insulinwho dont have health insurance at all. The only thing the Act would do is stop insurers from passing on more $35 a month of the cost to diabetics.

And even that was too much for the allegedly populist and anti-corporate MAGA wing of the GOP. Its a ludicrously tiny infringement on the Divine Right of Corporations to make as much money as all possible, at the expense of suffering people. That was too much for the MAGA populists.

If you can see this shameful episode and still believe that economic populism exists in any meaningful way on the American Right, I have a whole series of bridges to sell you.

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Republicans Just Proved 'Right Wing Populism' Is a Con Job - The Daily Beast

At first glance, Frances presidential election looks rather like a rerun of the 2017 contest. Most polls suggest that incumbent Emmanuel Macron will top Sundays first-round vote before facing, and defeating, Marine Le Pen in the April 24 runoff. In other words, 2022 will be the return leg of the previous electoral matchup between liberalism and nationalism. But beyond this superficial resemblance, the political landscape has profoundly changed since 2017.

Chief among these structural differences is that, as the mainstream has steadily shifted to the Right, the far right is stronger than ever. Before the first round, Le Pen is polling at similar levels to 2017, at around 20 percent. Yet, she fares much better in second-round polls. While she only took 33 percent in the 2017 runoff against Macron, her predicted score if she makes it this time is roughly 45 percent.

Furthermore, the major event that shook the 2022 campaign was the meteoric rise of another far-right candidate: ric Zemmour. While Le Pen has managed to maintain a lead over him, he initially threatened her chances, bringing her down from her hitherto comfortable place alongside Macron and far above all other candidates. Indeed, beyond its current divisions the latest iteration of an older divide between traditionalists and modernists, which I will explore in this and following articles the far right as a whole is showing remarkable electoral strength. Tellingly and somewhat chillingly regardless of their relative strength throughout the campaign, the combined voting intentions for Le Pen and Zemmour have remained steadily over 30 percent.

To better understand this situation, lets turn back to the political landscape in 2017, a tight election and unique moment in French political history. The traditional alternance, or exchange of power, between center-right and center-left, which had shaped France for the last three decades, seemed like a relic of the past, threatened by a rising tide of new political challengers.

On the Left, the discredit of the Socialist Party (PS) after Franois Hollandes presidency opened an unlikely path for Jean-Luc Mlenchon and the radical-left France Insoumise (LFI). On the Right, the conservative Les Rpublicains (LR) chose in Franois Fillon a hardliner who was weakened by a political-financial scandal involving his wife. Benefitting from the defeat and discredit of centrist candidates within these mainstream parties, former finance minister Macron filled the vacuum in the center by building a personalistic movement, En Marche, which promised renewal through a liberal politics beyond left and right.

Meanwhile, the Front National (FN) was progressively losing its pariah status. Since its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, infamous for his politically incorrect and overtly antisemitic quips, left his place as party leader to his daughter in 2011, its communication had changed drastically. Indeed, Marine Le Pen placed the strategy of ddiabolisation (de-demonization) at the heart of her leadership. To normalize the partys image, she sought to distance the FN from its association with racism and antisemitism.

In practice, this meant adapting its discourse to make it more acceptable without fundamentally changing its program, and also excluding problematic party members who did not follow that new line. Burdened by her fathers embarrassing legacy in her first 2012 campaign, three years later she evicted him from the party he created after yet another revisionist declaration on the Holocaust. While Le Pen pre and his most faithful supporters cried betrayal, this exclusion was framed by the new FN leader as the ultimate proof of her commitment to ddiabolisation.

Simultaneously, Le Pen emphasized the personalistic dimension of her leadership, distancing herself even from her fathers divisive surname. Instead, she played along to the sexist trope of female politicians being defined by their first name, encouraging references to herself as simply Marine. This was most visible in her 2012 bid to coalesce smaller far-right candidates around her Rassemblement Bleu Marine (Navy-Blue Rally) playing on the polysemy of her first name, which also stands for navy blue. While this was criticized internally as a sign that the FN was becoming a dynastic party, Le Pen emphasized her femininity and ordinariness, to humanize her and soften her image.

Inspired by Donald Trumps unexpected breakthrough in 2016 and influenced by her then right-hand man, Florian Philippot, Le Pen fully embraced the populist style in her 2017 campaign. To be clear, here populism is not understood as inherently reactionary or grounded in any specific ideological content, like the nationalism with which it is too often conflated. Rather, following the work of Ernesto Laclau and Benjamin Moffitt, I define populism as a political style a way of articulating of ones discourse.

The populist repertoire is built around three clusters: (1) framing politics as a conflict between the people and a specific elite although the exact content of what is meant by either depends on the ideological content that it shapes; (2) transgressing political norms to make oneself and ones message appear more authentic and closer to the people; (3) performing a crisis narrative which requires urgent change. Stripped to its core, the populist style articulates a society in crisis where an elite is failing in its duty to represent and act on behalf of its people, and where radical change is embodied through the salutary intervention of a transgressive leader.

But the ideological content of Le Pens campaign had already changed compared to her 2012 bid. Le Pen continued a trend that her father had begun in his 2007 campaign by adding social edge to her economic patriotism; she notably promised tax rebates to the smallest companies as well as various benefits aimed at the poorest. Although it remained grounded in an ethnocentric nationalism that de facto excluded immigrants, Le Pen defended a form of welfare chauvinism aimed at convincing blue-collar workers.

On social issues, she also toned down the most conservative side of her program. She adopted a form of ambiguity on issues like the death penalty, abortion, and same-sex marriage by not taking an overt stance on them, which contrasted with her explicitly reactionary position in 2012. The flagship measure of abandoning the euro, which occupied a whole chapter in her 2012 program, was kept but rephrased less radically as a return to monetary sovereignty.

However, what most notably distinguished Le Pens 2017 bid from her previous campaign was its populist framing, with her nationalist agenda entirely recast as a struggle by the people against an unresponsive elite. From her campaigns motto, In the name of the people, to the antiestablishment rhetoric in her campaign advertisement, Le Pens campaign heavily played on this antagonism to develop the image of a relatable outsider that would defend the people by changing the status quo.

This was also accompanied by a shift away from her party and its tricolor flame logo. Unlike in previous campaigns, Le Pen chose not to use any of the symbols and imagery associated with her party. Instead, Le Pen made the transgressive choice of embracing a blue rose, itself representing the claim to go beyond left and right: blue is traditionally associated with conservatives in France, whereas the rose has historically been the emblem of the Socialist Party.

Understood in this light, populism provided a way for her to cover her exclusionary nationalism with a new coat of paint. Fighting to close the French nation from foreign immigrants and influences sounds backward-looking, and implies an exclusionary vision of the nation. But framing this as a matter of defending the French people against a political and intellectual elite that benefits from immigration and enables terrorism made it seem much more legitimate to far more people.

This new line furthermore provided a way for the FN to reach beyond the traditional core of far-right supporters by appealing to the large pool of habitual nonvoters disappointed by the traditional parties. In a nutshell, the populist style which she was far from the only candidate to mobilize in that election allowed her to modernize her ideology and close off room for accusations of xenophobia or racism a natural fit with her de-demonization strategy.

So, what has changed for Le Pen and the far right more widely in 2022? The first part of this answer lies in a backlash against her personalistic and populist line from within her own political camp.

Although Le Pens 2017 results were a record performance for her party, the end of her campaign was tainted by her catastrophic performance in the debate with Macron during the runoff. Although Le Pen had developed a reputation as a combative debater, in this case she reached a new level of aggression. Furthermore, since Macron extended the first part of the debate on economic issues as long as he could, Le Pen ended up looking unprepared and out of her depth. She did partly recover in the latter half of the debate on security, but never regained the upper ground with commentators widely framing her abundant use of irony as flippant. In a rare candid admission of error, Le Pen later acknowledged that this was a failed rendez-vous with the French people,

Inside her own camp, Le Pens performance was seen as the embodiment of two things. Firstly, on a personal level, it was framed as a demonstration that Le Pen lacked the professionalism and stature to be a credible contender for the presidency a criticism especially damning as it was even leveled by her own father. Secondly, her crushing defeat by Macron highlighted the limits of a strategy reliant on populism and de-demonization. Some in the party insisted that Le Pen had diluted her message so much that her campaign lacked ideological spine and lost part of its radical appeal or even accused her of having become too leftist because of her choice to include social measures and incorporate criticism of laisser-faire into her anti-elite rhetoric. For them, courting voters disappointed by left-wing politicians was a fools errand which could never lead to victory.

Proponents of this line argued that the only path to success was to explode the republican dam between mainstream conservatives and the far right. In other words, rather than the populist promise to go beyond Left and Right, the FN should pursue the union of the right wings by reconciling the mainstream-conservative LR with the FN to create a united family of patriots. During the 2017 campaign, Le Pen described such an aspiration as a fantasy, but her disappointing second-round performance merely fueled her critics argument.

This conflict between a traditionalist wing calling for a return to the ideological fundamentals of the Right and a modernist wing seeking mainstream acceptance is nearly as old as the far right in France. In one of the major historic disputes within the FN, Bruno Mgret a key figure responsible for modernizing the partys ideological doctrine openly clashed with Jean-Marie Le Pen in the late 1990s, claiming that his transgressive posturing would never lead to victory. Le Pen pres refusal to change and his exclusion of Mgret led many high-ranking members to leave the FN with him, including Marine Le Pens eldest sister, Marie-Caroline Le Pen.

Indeed, the Tours congress in 2011, which determined who would succeed the founding leader, saw a re-emergence of this divide. Although Marine Le Pen garnered more than two-thirds of the votes with her promise to modernize the party, she confronted her fathers heir apparent, Bruno Gollnisch, who defended a much more conservative program.

After her defeat in 2017, Le Pen made some concessions to her critics from the conservative wing, pushing advisor Florian Philippot to leave the FN in September 2017. Having the man most closely associated with the FNs populist turn quit its ranks could be seen as an attempt at re-centering her party. Yet, this was also a perfect opportunity for Le Pen to get rid of a polarizing rival who had become increasingly central to the party and also made him the scapegoat for the campaigns various missteps.

Moreover, it further solidified her existing iron grip over the party, slowly isolating those who disagreed too openly and surrounding herself with faithful lieutenants like Jordan Bardella, a twenty-six-year-old whose meteoric rise in the party was entirely owed to Marine Le Pen herself. His youth, polished rhetoric, and ease in TV appearances, made him the ideal face of a de-demonized party. After a successful trial run as head of the 2019 European election campaign, Bardella was even made temporary party leader while Le Pen was campaigning for president a sign of trust demonstrating his solidified place within her innermost circle.

Indeed, Philippots departure would remain the only major change in Le Pens strategy as she set her focus on 2022. She persevered in her attempts at softening and normalizing both her partys and her own image. The most visible illustration of this was the name change in June 2018, as the party abandoned the divisive and combative connotations of Front to become Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN), a word which was associated with an idea of inclusive gathering while being the continuation of the aforementioned Rassemblement Bleu Marine.

For her 2022 campaign, Le Pen even abandoned the blue color, which was not only associated with her name but also semiotically attached to the Right. Instead, she chose a vivid green to serve as a natural backdrop for an optimistic pose that could have been lifted straight out of a green partys campaign. Le Pen added more focus on her personal life, as could be seen in her increasingly frequent mentions to her passion for cat breeding.

Ideologically speaking, she further accentuated her de-demonization strategy by developing two complementary tactics: mainstreaming her program and accentuating the populist framing of her politics as a struggle for the people beyond the Left/Right cleavage. To do so, she first removed several of the most controversial measures in her 2017 program, most notably the departure from the European Union, exiting the Schengen Area or returning to a national currency.

Instead, she continued the superficial hybridization of her nationalist and conservative agenda with exogenous elements from apparently left-wing ideologies, a phenomenon that was already apparent in her 2017 campaign with the introduction of social undertones to her rhetoric. Among the newest additions for 2022, the concept of localism,theorized by Herv Juvin, provided a local counterpart to the notion of national preference while introducing a green twist to her program.

Le Pens strategic decision to double down on her normalizing strategy for the 2022 campaign unsurprisingly did little to satisfy party hardliners. Worse than that, her attempts at marginalizing the voices of her critics became increasingly obvious over the years leading to the next election. A major turning point happened in 2020 as Le Pen prevented many of the most prominent representatives of her internal opposition, including notably Gilbert Collard and Nicolas Bay, from being part of the commission nationale dinvestiture,the committee determining local candidates for future elections. The event, which some described as a purge, pushed Marion Marchal, Le Pens niece and the rising star of the conservative wing of the party, to take a stand in the media against her aunt.

Marchal, who used to go by Marchal-Le Pen until 2018, had made history as the youngest member of parliament in 2012. She then retired from electoral politics after the 2017 campaign to launch a private political science school with the purpose of training up cadres from the right, from all the strands of the right. As against the aim of electing Le Pen through what Bardella called a front populaire populiste opposed to liberal elites, Marchal became the most vehement advocate for a return to the strategy of the union of the right wings. This would mark a clear return to the left/right cleavage, with the RN contesting the leadership of the declining LR, the conservative party weakened by Macrons hostile takeover of the center-right. However, despite her protests against the marginalization of her allies within the RN, Marchal had chosen to bide her time and build her networks outside of party politics. Acknowledging the dominance of her aunts strategy within the RN, it seemed that Marchal was betting on Le Pens defeat in 2022, so that she could herself make a bid in 2027.

Indeed, although she asserted her control of her party in a less openly authoritarian manner than her father did, Marine Le Pen managed to quell most internal dissent without appearing overly rigid or controlling. In a remarkable parallel with her overall success in crafting a smoother image for her party without compromising on its nationalist radicalism, Le Pens strict leadership did not seem to affect the relatable persona she had constructed in the public eye. In both party and personal matters, Le Pen thus perfectly embodied an iron fist in a velvet glove.

However, the image of a party cohesively united behind the leader, which Le Pen had worked so hard to mold for the RNs presidential campaign, soon showed cracks with the causes of discord only temporarily silenced. Indeed, as internal challenges to Le Pen seemed doomed to fail, the perspective of a successful comeback from the traditionalist line unsurprisingly came from an outsider: ric Zemmour. A conservative pundit in the media eye, Zemmours voice in the far right mattered and he has always been a critic of Le Pen, both strategically and personally.

A few days after Le Pens defeat in the 2017 runoff, Zemmour targeted scathing criticisms toward her, describing her campaign as a complete debacle and comparing her to a reverse Midas that turned into lead all the gold she was touching. Today, the longtime journalist is challenging her hegemony over the far-right camp in France, as he mounts his own bid for the presidency. In a second article, I will discuss what the rise of Zemmour represents exploring its consequences for the future of the far right and of French politics more generally.

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Marine Le Pen's Populist Image Is an Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove - Jacobin magazine

Indias top bureaucrats are worried about political parties resorting to competitive populism and announcing fiscally unsustainable schemes to win votes in state elections. Reports suggest that they voiced these concerns to the Prime Minister in a meeting on April 2.

We did not need secretaries of the government of India to highlight the growing tendency towards competitive populism in India. Political parties are increasingly promising all sorts of things to voters from restoration of the old pension scheme for government employees to cash and two-wheelers for students who enter or finish college and free pilgrimage to senior citizens.

Is this new wave of competitive populism going to lead to a fiscal disaster in the country? Who exactly is responsible for this kind of behaviour? And can a political consensus be built to prevent such spending by state governments?

How big a problem is competitive populism in India?

This is not an easy question to answer. A state can spend money on providing free food over and above what the Public Distribution System (PDS) entitlements provide for, or it can spend money giving scooters to students who have entered college. There are enough examples of political parties making such promises in India.

And there is bipartisan support for this kind of politics. For example, both the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) led government in Kerala and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh banked heavily on the free ration scheme in the elections held in 2021 and 2022. The Congress accused the BJP of copying its demand of giving free scooters to women students in the recently held Uttar Pradesh elections.

While a fiscal hawk will scoff at both kinds of spending, especially if the state is hard-pressed for resources, the actual economic impact of such programmes is likely to be quite different. Additional food entitlements are likely to generate tailwinds for aggregate demand as the recipient households will be able to spend the money they would have had to spend on food on other items. Such a scheme is also targeted towards the most needy. The same cannot be said about gifting scooters to students. That money would have had a better use somewhere else. Similarly, farm loan waivers are a sub-optimal use of money towards throwing palliatives at what is a structural problem and often at the cost of long-term spending in agriculture.

This qualitative difference in the effect of various populist schemes also underlines the pitfalls of reading too much into headline numbers on categories such as social service spending by state governments. Building a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative database of what and where exactly state governments are spending on populist schemes, and how it is affecting the macroeconomy and society is a project which can keep even a large think tank busy for the next couple of years.

What drives this political behaviour?

The lack of clarity on the second question is the biggest reason why some of these schemes have attracted economists who use randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to understand policy decisions and their impact in India.

While the RCT method has been duly recognised with a Nobel Prize to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer in 2019, there is an illustrious list of economists who have spoken against the dangers of relying too much on RCTs to make large policy decisions. The short point is, economists, on their own, are unlikely to arrive at an agreement on the impact or efficacy of such policies.

This brings us to the question of why are politicians doing this? The clichd answer that they do not care about fiscal prudence will not suffice, because state governments have to adhere to a more stringent fiscal norm than the Centre in India. When read with the fact that states have been left with very little tax sovereignty after the roll-out of Goods and Services Tax (GST), this is an even more intriguing question.

At the risk of oversimplification, one can say that the best answer to this question was given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a campaign speech during the recently held Uttar Pradesh elections. Speaking at a rally on February 20, Modi referred to a social media video, where an old woman was pledging loyalty to the BJP because she had tasted Modis salt (ration) and therefore wont ditch him. While this can sound like usual election rhetoric to some, political scientists have been arguing that the BJP has been making a concerted effort to centralise welfare delivery which also leads to greater attribution for giving these benefits to none other than the Prime Minister.

This extraordinary centralisation of power, not just institutionally but also within the BJP, implies that the voter is increasingly likely to attribute (that is, give credit for) the delivery of economic benefits to Modi rather than the state-level leader. This contrasts with much of the 2000s, where, after a spate of fiscal decentralisation, several state-level leaders built their reputations on the ability to deliver benefits Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research argued in a March 2021 Economic and Political Weekly article.

While Sircar argues that this process has also weakened the welfare credentials of chief ministers from the BJP and its allies too, and they will most likely look to establish their credentials not in welfare delivery but in Hindu mobilisation, it is not surprising that the anti-BJP parties have been trying to outdo the BJP by promising more populist schemes. Promises such as restoration of old pensions scheme and cash transfers by anti-BJP parties need to be seen in this light.

As is obvious, competitive populism by regional political forces is a last-ditch attempt to push back against the BJP which is the new national political hegemon in India. To meet such challenges, the BJP also indulges in competitive populism at the level of states, not to speak to decisions such as implementing PM-Kisan, which gives 6,000 to every farmer in India, from the Centre a decision taken after the BJP lost crucial state elections just before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Realpolitik suggests that regional parties are unlikely to prioritise long-term economic health over political survival. And that perhaps answers the third question.

Every Friday, HTs data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal

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Terms of Trade | What drives competitive populism in India? - Hindustan Times

Vichardhara kya hai tumhari(What is your ideology?)I had askedto a group of 18-year-old boysthatI met at Jaunpur during my recent election travel. Theyreplied,woh kaun dekhta haihum toh vote Modi-Yogi ko denge.Its not like they didnt know what the word ideology meant, theydid muddle about Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra;its just that they dont need to apply any ideology to shape their political musings. Rather for them,their attachment to politics is moulded by their personal instinctsand liking to the leader, Modi ji, and their way of politicking.

Something similar had happened at a family functioninmy mothers village in Rajasthan. Election talks of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab had stirred the conversation to Rajasthanassemblyelections of 2023.Politics ofRajasthanhas always been dominated by eithertheCongress ortheBJP. So, it was a little shocking when some of the cousins mentioned AAP as their preference. When I inquiredwhy,they had no definite answer. One said bahut ho gaya Vasundhra aur Gehlot,Rajasthan needs change while for the other,it was the pull of Arvind Kejriwal and his clean image.

Par haan desh ke liye, hamesha Modi ji, I was reminded as a matter of fact, by my cousins, in case I took them as anti-Modi supporters.

Also read: Delhi can finally breathe clean air in winterif Punjabs new AAP govt can convince farmers

The public discourse has become devoid of the nuances that once used to fascinateand gripthe ideological narrative. The public of today, particularly the young and the restless, have lost patience and their desire is for instant politics, like instant noodles. As suchthe political behavior of the voter has undergone a change. Gone are the days when over cups of tea andcharcha,election manifestos would be discussed. Gone are the days when loyalty to a party would be based on ideology, policiesand performance. Inthetime of WhatsApp and social media,nobody wants to read those boring manifestoswith big ideas anymore. Their demand is for instant benefits, for freebies. They want snappy videos of castigation, of politicians of other parties being presented in poor demeaning light.

People wanta nayakto relate to, amahanayakwho adds zing to the narrative, andakhalnayakfor entertainment and sneering.

HaveIndias traditional ideological clashes faded out in these newer times? Have weenteredthe post-ideological times? Or is the new -ism of New Indiapopulism?

Populism hasbarely everbeenconsideredorused as an alternative to ideology to understand the phenomena of Narendra Modi and his politics.When Aatish Taseer wrote an article in theTime Magazinein 2019 Of the great democracies to fall to populism, India was the firsthe had faced the wrath of the Modi Sarkar.

In 2004, a young Dutch political scientist named Cas Mudde publishedThe Populist Zeitgeist, a paper that proposed a new and concise definition of populism. He defines populism firstasthe idea where society is separated into two groups,at odds with one another the pure people, understood to be fundamentally good and the corrupt elite, understood to be fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with everyday life.As per the second definition,populists believe that politics should be an expression of the general will a set of desires presumed to be shared as common sense by all ordinary people.

If weapplythis theory tounderstandthe newer politicaldiscoursethat has been shaping India, apicture emerges.

In 2014,Narendra Modi made the Prime Ministerial appeal as a humble candidate with no strings attached, having an ordinary background with rootsina poor family. Proclaiming himself aschaiwala,kaamdaar, and achowkidaar(in 2019),Modi tapped into the sentiments of thepeople. He launched attacks on the Congress, saying they are a party ofnaamdaarswho were born with a silver spoon in their mouth.Dynasticpolitics thus became a depraved term. So high was the rhetoric that a narrative was set which was emotional in its political toneand excitingin the rhetoric, thereby giving Modi his first thumping win in 2014. A narrativethathas beenrepeatedly put to usein multipleassembly electionssince then. And five years later, in 2019,it became onlylarger, encompassing the expression of the general will.

Today,the moodis at its zenith,incessantly being cultivated, of Hindus being persecuted in their own land, and becoming more righteous postThe Kashmir Files. Narendra Modi (along with Yogi Adityanath) has imbued into the conscience of the people that if there is anybody who can keep India safe from invaders (Pakistan) it is them. Adding to it the belief of the parent organisation of making India a Hindu Rashtra, Narendra Modi has invincibly become the common sense of the people.

Also read: BJP is no longer just a Brahmin-Bania-Zamindar party. UPs labarthis show why

But its not just Modi, Arvind Kejriwaltoois fast becoming aformidablecontenderin national politics. Today,Kejriwal has a following in Rajasthan where his party has no visibility, where the local journalists claim that it will take another election (maybe by 2028) to establish ground in the mind and heart of Rajasthan.Butthe mood is already brewing forhim.

Kejriwals AAP is a classic political example of the post-ideological times. A party which is devoid of ideology or political leanings, minus any caste, creed or identity politics, yet has managed to fill the vacuum of the other alternative. To establishhimselfin politics,Kejriwalclung to the ideas and ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, donning thetopiofaam aadmi. But when the mood changed, Gandhi was replaced by Bhagat Singh and withtopicame the recitation ofHanuman Chalisa. Swaying with the time,Kejriwal filled the dots of not becoming an -ism of any traditional ideology artfully. He offers free electricity and employment to counter Modisfree ration, he takes upon corruption to counter Modis parivarvaadattackand to counter the Gujarat Model,Kejriwal has developed a Delhi Model thus sweeping the state of Punjab.

AAP, akin to BJP of Modi, has become a political party of newer times, built for a crowd that jiggles and thrives on boisterous cult personalities.

Along with job, money, security,jantaalso craves forflamboyanceand sloganeering like Bulldozer Baba,Modi haitomumkin hai, double-engine sarkar. It is aboutYogibulldozerbaba vs AkhileshbhaiyaYadav, NarendrahopeModi vs RahulPappuGandhi.

Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, both, in some ways have become the icons in this post-ideological populism movement, one that consistently promises to channel the unified will of the people, and by doing so undercuts the self-serving schemes of the elite establishment. Maude,however,clears to say that populism is not a fully formed political ideology like socialism or liberalism rather it is a thin ideology.

The sheer defeat of Congress and the smaller regional parties in the recently concluded assembly elections have made them irrelevant to the politics of newer times.Congress leaderShashi Tharoorwroteina national magazine, claimingCongress is essential for India and how it can be revived.He explainsthe ideology ofthe party, reminding of the past, secularism,and theeconomic prosperity India achieved underthe party. But he forgetsthatthe newer generation does not care. For them, the traditional ideologies have been sidelined with a simplistic narrative of Left is bad, Right is good,one that has become the pragmatic reasoning.

In New India,the concept of development, a commitment towards nation building upon ideology, is not finding space in the instant moodand political behaviorof the new generation. Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, followed by Mamata Banerjee, KCR, Jagan Reddy, all are speaking a language directed to an audience that wants no attachment to inclinationsor beliefs.

Populismis here to stay, cementing robustly and perhaps becomingtheideology of New India.

Shruti Vyas is a journalist based in New Delhi. She writes on politics, international relations and current affairs. Views are personal.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)

Originally posted here:

Indians bored with politics of ideology. Populism speaksfrom Modi to Kejriwal - ThePrint