Category Archives: Populism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possibly because the notion of Critical Race Theory is so vague to most conservative voters, when Republican Glenn Youngkin, then-candidate for Virginia governor, ran for office, he labeled himself as the parents rights candidate by attempting further to instill fear on the part of the white electorate.

He raised his racist bullhorn by declaring not only his intent to ban Critical Race Theory the day he is elected but also to outlaw the reading of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel by author Toni Morrison, Beloved, which was turned into a major feature film.

Related: 64 things Joe Biden has done for the LGBTQ community during his first year in office

Beloved, a truthful and painful story of the lives and loves of two enslaved black people in the U.S. South, has become an integral part of the cannon of not only African American literature but of U.S.-American literature generally.

After winning the Virginia gubernatorial election and with the support of the Virginia state legislature, new bills to limit the teaching of our countrys true past have circulated throughout the Virginia statehouse.

House bill No. 781, proposed by Republican Delegate Wren Williams, prohibits divisive concepts from instruction in Virginia public elementary and secondary schools.While Williams made clear his opposition to the teaching of Critical Race Theory, the wording divisive concepts in its vagueness closes the door on the teaching of anything and everything conservatives deem appropriate and necessary to ban.

In the wording of the bill, Virginias social studies curriculum will be standardized (a.k.a. controlled and regimented) and educators will teach about, founding documents of the United States, like the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Even Virginias elementary and secondary school students, I would hope, know so much more than the legislators attempting to enact severe constraints on curriculum and pedagogy throughout their systems of education.

By the 5th grade, students should have learned about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in Illinois between incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Lincoln, his Republican challenger in the race for U.S. senator. The major topic during the series of seven debates included the candidates views on whether new states joining the union would permit or prohibit slavery within their borders.

In Youngkins inauguration speech on Saturday, January 15, 2022, he seemed to talk from both sides of his mouth when he promised,We will remove politics from the classroom and re-focus on essential math, science and reading. And we will teach all of our history the good and the bad.

Then within an hour following his speech, he immediately signed 11 executive orders including lifting the mask mandate for Virginia schools and ending the vaccine mandate for state employees in a school system and state with increasingly rising infection rates.

Wanting to be known as The Education Governor, one of his executive orders ends the use of divisive concepts in schools such as Critical Race Theory, which is not currently part of the curriculum.

One day later in an interview on Fox, Youngkin doubled down on his misunderstanding, the perpetuation of misinformation, and yes, the politicization of the teaching of the legacy of racism and race relations in the United States.

We are not going to teach the children to view everything through a lens of race. Yes, we will teach all history, the good and the bad. Because we cant know where were going unless we know where we have come from. But to actually teach our children that one group is advantaged and the other disadvantaged because of the color of skin, cuts everything we know to be true.

So, whom does Youngkin designate as we in everything we know to be true?

The Virginia governor and state legislature pose a great and common example clearly demonstrating why politicians cannot and must not dictate the parameters of what educators teach in the schools throughout the nation.

Professor and Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton, Shelley Inglis, studies authoritarian leaders around the world and came up with a list of ten common markers characteristic to many.

One maker states that authoritarians appeal to populism and nationalism. While populism encompasses a range of political stances emphasizing the idea of siding with the people against the so-called elite and can exist on the political left, the right, or the center, right-wing populism co-opts the term and juxtaposes nationalist and nativist aims. This form of populism we have clearly witnessed during this era of Trumpism.

Another of Inglis markers of authoritarianism is the control of information at home (propaganda and stifling of truth in schools, the media, and the larger society) and misinformation abroad.

Though Youngkin is but a petty autocrat in one state, his influence has become immense since winning the Virginia statehouse. The larger Republican Party is taking several pages from his political playbook by first, straddling the line between embracing Trumps brand of populism while keeping a certain distance from the twice impeached failed president.

Secondly, they have implemented Youngkins successful tactic of scaring parents and other community members with the false flag of Critical Race Theory by banning age-appropriate truthful education of young people to the realities of our history.

While Youngkin promised to allow the teaching of our history, the good and the bad, the schools will continue to teach a watered-down whitewashed version of what students need to know to help our country come to terms with and begin to heal from the violations to human and civil rights of the past.

Before Youngkin won his election and continuing to the present day, since January 2021, Education Week has found that 32 states have either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Thirteen states have already inflicted these restrictions.

Just think about it: States are passing laws and enacting executive orders banning the teaching of how the states passed laws banning the teaching of enslaved peoples under the apartheid system of U.S.-American slavery.

They are passing laws and enacting executive orders banning the teaching of how the states passed laws banning voting rights of people of color.

These very laws and executive order banning the teaching of the true legacy of race confirms one of the primary characteristics of Critical Race Theory: that racism is a permanent feature of the U.S. political and social system.

These laws challenge any reality, any truth that contradicts the pablum we are fed as young people of the nationalist narrative that this country functions as a meritocracy: that the individual succeeds or fails based chiefly on their merit, from their motivation, abilities, values, ambition, commitment, and persistence, rather than on their backgrounds or social identities.

Autocrats have a vested stake in withholding the true accounting of our past.

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Glenn Youngkin wants to be the Education Governor but he doesn't want schools to teach the truth - LGBTQ Nation

By John Ruch

A truism of the Buckhead cityhood debate is that its unique, this spectacle of a huge community trying to secede from a major U.S. city. Thing is, thats not true.

Up in Alaska, a community called Eagle River is leading several others in a secession quest to unanchor themselves from Anchorage. The movement has instructive similarities with Buckhead City, from conservative politics to a mutual consultant. And it goes by Eaglexit, a Brexit-inspired name that situates these municipal efforts in a bigger context of secession sentiments like the National Divorce and right-wing populism that the establishment repeatedly ignores or misunderstands at its peril.

Majority white and concentrated with fabulous wealth as a legacy of Jim Crow segregation, and annexed in 1952 partly for racist fears of a Black-run Atlanta, Buckhead has always been different from other neighborhoods. An irony for some cityhood opponents is how their handling of modern differences has fueled the secession sentiment: the touting of local exceptionalism including even the creation of a neighborhood flag and aloof, back-room policy-making. Buckhead has a communal exasperation with City Hall and big business that pretty easily shifts into an identity fraught with grievance and opposition. Even if cityhood dies this year, attitudes along that spectrum arent changing anytime soon. As it is, the Buckhead City Committee (BCC) is hammering the goal-post-moving idea that nothing the new mayor says or does can be better than cityhood.

I heard similar sentiments when I spoke to Sean Murphy, the chair of Eaglexit.

Anchorage elected a conservative mayor after a string of liberals, Murphy noted as a win last year for Eaglexits political base. But, he added, the quest to sever any political ties with the city continues because we are different culturally, socioeconomically.

Another similarity with Buckhead City is the rhetorical metaphor of dissolving a marriage the Great Divorce, as one prominent Eaglexit supporter calls it. The same metaphor is deployed in the National Divorce, a Civil War-esque notion of the U.S.s red and blue states separating into distinct countries. That idea recently got social media promotion from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a far-right conspiracy theorist who last year supported Buckhead cityhood in a tweet that pictured her side-by-side with BCC Chairman and CEO Bill White.

Eaglexit and Buckhead City also share a consultant Oliver Porter, the architect of the City of Sandy Springs initial method of outsourcing almost all government services following its 2005 incorporation in north Fulton County.

He basically gave us the foundation that this is a political process, Murphy said of Porter. He wanted to really let it be known, even if youre just trying to educate people at this time and gain support, this is a really political process and you really want to play that from the start.

Of course, Eaglexit has many differences from the Buckhead movement, from politics to sheer scale. (The secession area covers over 1,000 square miles of the sprawling city.) But its unique story also has local lessons for how legally messy the process can get and how enduring cityhood sentiment can remain.

The Eagle River area actually won its municipalization battle briefly over 45 years ago before quickly being ruled unconstitutional by the Alaska Supreme Court. According to Eaglexit, the idea came about after requests for better policing. In 1974, voters approved the creation of a new Chugiak-Eagle River Borough a regional government akin to a Georgia county. Lawsuits ensued and the borough was killed even though its government had formed. In 1976, backers tried to reincorporate as another form of borough but were denied by a state commission on several grounds, including constitutional issues, its status as an integral part of the city, and lack of natural boundaries or a sufficient tax base.

Nearly 30 years later, in 2004, the cityhood idea revived with calls for more local control of taxes and schools. But a feasibility study was unkind. It said that leaving Anchorage would mean higher taxes or cuts in services and schools in some areas though some backers said the price would be worth paying. As with Buckhead City, bond debt and City contracts were concerns. Eaglexit says the movement lost momentum after the studys talk of how divorce proceedings would be long, tedious and potentially divisive.

Another 15 years and the idea returned in 2019 as Eaglexit. The new version overlaps with Assembly District 2, Anchorages version of a city council or county commission district, and has a positive feasibility study in its pocket. Similar to Buckhead City, the movement also had an initial chair who was a state Republican Party operative known for inflammatory political tweets. Somewhat controversially, Eaglexit has partnered with a Texas nonprofit called the Justice Foundation, a small-government advocacy group particularly known for anti-abortion work, as a fiscal agent.

Eaglexit is working on further study and is in an educational phase. Some of its motives were expressed in an online survey. One question asked whether respondents wanted more local control of decisions regarding taxation, schools, land use and public safety. Another asked if they agreed that Assembly District 2 has a different identity, and different values than Anchorage does.

Anchorage Assembly has nine members that are totally liberal Marxists and two who are not, and those two represent us, Murphy said. And the flip side of that is there are conservatives in Anchorage who dont want to lose our vote.

Another political challenge, Murphy said, is the demand for more details in the break-up plan. There are people, they want all the answers before they can jump, and thats hard to overcome, he said.

Buckhead City is facing the same challenge, and it remains to be seen whether the legislature or governor or voters, if it comes to that, will be convinced. If not, thats unlikely to be the end. Like its northern counterpart, Buckhead cityhood is an old idea, last seen in a big public meeting in 2008, now re-emerging from dormancy.

Previous failure is one reason the current Buckhead City momentum has caught Atlantas movers and shakers by surprise. But its striking how theyve also simply misread its political chances, much the way the establishment in 2016 underestimated Donald Trump (whose family, it happens, is friendly with White, the BCC leader).

Early attention to the BCCs pitch zoomed in on details of crime stats and municipal finances, missing that the appeal is really about more conservative political and cultural reactions to how a city handles those subjects, with its local support coming mostly from Republican residents. The overlooked larger dynamic was the state Republican Partys chance to mess with Blue Atlanta.

Opponents are now engaged with the state-level political battle, but this isnt just about parties. The populist aspect is still being overlooked and the cityhood notion wouldnt be going anywhere without it.

Buckhead separatism isnt hard to conceive when, if were honest, its often talked about as quasi-separate already, sometimes by locals living in a bubble and sometimes by fellow Atlantans who treat it like an embarrassing uncle from north Fulton. Its been that way for years, but this is a time when self-determination and anti-elitism is the hot trend across the political spectrum. Part of the establishment surprise about Buckhead cityhood is that politicians and tycoons didnt simply gather behind closed doors and strangle it in its crib like theyve done with other disfavored ideas via the Atlanta Way. It may just be working slower, but the Atlanta Way took a beating from candidates this year in an election where voters clearly wanted to sweep out old-school figures and have more citizen input in government.

The notion of financially elite Buckhead being populist may seem counterintuitive, but long before the BCC came along, locals have agitated about remote and unresponsive government. Some of its cranky or partisan, but its true that Atlanta really did cook up some zoning changes in secretive and confusing ways and really did have a mayor stupendously absent in the wake of shocking crimes. A bigger question is what kind of populism appeals, as the cityhood brand is showing its capacity for taking dark turns with Whites recent social media posts about race and racism. Meanwhile, Mayor Andre Dickens is trying his own personal touch with support from local grassroots anti-cityhood groups.

Its remarkable enough that even the immediate future of the cityhood legislation is hard to predict as it goes before the General Assembly in a session that began this week. Or that if it doesnt pass in 2022, its not hard to predict its return in a lot less than 45 or 20 or 15 years from now.

See the article here:

Alaska and Buckhead cityhood movements show similar ties to right-wing populism - SaportaReport

Sir, I feel compelled to respond to Neil Cronin and Niall Gintys (separate) defences of centrist democracy, apparently under threat in Ireland from populist forces similar to those unleashed in the US on January 6th, 2021 (Letters, January 8th).

Neither correspondent chose to name the source of this supposed threat, perhaps to maintain the delicious frisson of fear which keeps centrists cosy in their beds at night.

We may safely infer, however, that their comments were directed towards Sinn Fin (after all, next to the more excitable cohort of the partys supporters, it is only militant centrists who view Sinn Fin as a material threat to the status quo).

This concept of populism deserves closer scrutiny. The term has no fixed meaning, but is most commonly deployed (in Ireland, at least) to lampoon policies which privilege the public interest over the demands of the wealth-hoarding classes.

It is, of course, entirely a coincidence that the sober, realistic, pragmatic path advocated by opponents of populism is always the one which further enriches the rich.

Indeed, this caricatured populism the promise of goodies which cannot be delivered in the real world could more aptly be applied to the establishments handling of the ongoing pandemic. How else to account for its insistence that no amount of death or disease can, or should, interfere with the consumption patterns of Fine Gaels and Fianna Fils voter base?

How else to describe its belief that schools, pubs and restaurants exist in a magical bubble wherein the laws of epidemiology do not apply? How else to define its habitual and divisive haranguing of (always unionised) workforces as privileged elites whenever their interests conflict with those of the State and its corporate clients?

Theirs is neither a productive nor a popular form of populism, but it is (alas!) the closest thing to such a phenomenon which currently exists in our politically impoverished State. Yours, etc,

TURLOUGH

KELLY,

Ringsend,

Dublin 4.

Link:

Populism and politics - The Irish Times

Investors and policymakers alike will have to come to grips with a radically different macro environment over the secular horizon as the post-financial-crisis, pre-pandemic New Normal decade of subpar-but-stable growth, below-target inflation, subdued volatility, and juicy asset returns is rapidly fading in the rear-view mirror.

What lies ahead is a more uncertain and uneven growth and inflation environment with plenty of pitfalls for policymakers. Amid disruption, division, and divergence, overall capital market returns will likely be lower and more volatile. But active investors capable of navigating the difficult terrain should find good alpha opportunities.

Read Spotlight

Initial conditions

As such, this year's secular thesis further develops the themes we highlighted in our 2020 Secular Outlook - Escalating Disruption. PIMCO argued then that the pandemic would serve as a catalyst for accelerating and amplifying four important secular disruptors: the China-U.S. rivalry, populism, technology, and climate change.

Developments over the past year have reinforced those expectations. China-U.S. tensions have not only continued but intensified under the Biden administration. Populism and polarization have been on the rise in many countries, further fuelled by politically charged divisions over lockdowns and vaccines.

Digitalization and automation have been turbocharged by the pandemic. Extreme weather conditions in many parts of the world have also inflicted severe human and economic losses and contributed to major gyrations in energy markets. In our forum discussions we concluded that each of these secular disruptors will remain active in the foreseeable future.

Another important initial condition for the secular outlook is the sharp further increase in public and private sector debt caused by the pandemic recession and the policy responses. To be sure, with borrowing costs at or close to record lows, record high debt levels are not an immediate concern. However, higher leverage implies heightened vulnerability of public and private sector balance sheets to negative growth shocks and to positive interest rate shocks, thus increasing the risk of destabilizing runs on sovereign and private borrowers.

Moreover, elevated debt levels and highly financialized economies as measured by wealth-to-income ratios will likely constrain central banks' ability to push interest rates aggressively higher without causing severe economic pain - a financial market dominance theme.

To learn more about the key risk facing income investors and how the PIMCO team approach mitigtating these while building more resiliant income click on the button below.

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This post was funded by PIMCO

For investment professionals only.PIMCO Europe Ltd (Company No. 2604517) Ltd (Company No. 2604517) and PIMCO Europe Ltd - Italy (Company No. 07533910969) are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (12 Endeavour Square, London E20 1JN) in the UK. PIMCO Europe Ltd services are available only to professional clients as defined in the Financial Conduct Authority's Handbook and are not available to individual investors, who should not rely on this communication.

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Partner Insight: Which disruptive themes might drive the post-pandemic economy? - Investment Week

An incisive account of Erdoans Turkey showing how its troubling transformation may be short-lived

Since coming to power in 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoan has overseen a radical transformation of Turkey. Once a pillar of the Western alliance, the country has embarked on a militaristic foreign policy, intervening in regional flashpoints from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya. And its democracy, sustained by the aspiration to join the European Union, has given way to one-man rule.Dimitar Bechev traces the political trajectory of Erdoans populist regime, from the era of reform and prosperity in the 2000s to the effects of the war in neighboring Syria. In a tale of missed opportunities, Bechev explores how Turkey parted ways with the United States and Europe, embraced Putins Russia and other revisionist powers, and replaced a frail democratic regime with an authoritarian one. Despite this, he argues that Turkeys democratic instincts are resilient, its economic ties to Europe are as strong as ever, and Erdoan will fail to achieve a fully autocratic regime.

A sweeping attempt to capture the last 20 years of Turkey, Bechev skilfully traces the radical transformation of Turkeys domestic and foreign policies under Recep Tayyip Erdoan. An outstanding book from one of the best.Gnl Tol, Middle East Institute

A compelling narrative, rich in anecdotes, quotes, and carefully chosen empirical examples, enlivens an in-depth historical analysis of Turkeys evolution from the 1970s until today. Bechev charts Turkeys modernization, the rise of Islamist populism, its geopolitical shift from the periphery of the West to its bid for regional hegemony, as well as the weaknesses of the competitive authoritarian regime that its President Erdoan has crafted.Rosa Balfour, Director of Carnegie Europe

Bechev analyzes the two decades that witnessed the evolution of President Erdoan from a seemingly EU-friendly Muslim democrat to a strongman. He masterfully portrays how the shifts in AKPs foreign policy were intertwined with rising authoritarian practices in Turkey.Professor Aye Kadolu, Sabanci University

Read this article:

Turkey Under Erdoan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West - Carnegie Europe

With his politics that is decidedly leftist and populist, even if Arvind Kejriwal cannot break into leading the Opposition in 2024, he could be very well positioned by 2029

The latest opinion poll on the forthcoming Assembly elections almost gives Punjab to AAP outright. At 53-57 seats expected to be won by it, it is just short of a majority in the 117 seat Punjab Assembly. This is up from the 20 it opened its account with in the 2017 elections. These present indications are higher than another poll conducted a few weeks ago.

If these poll predictions turn out to be true, and the AAPs good showing in the recently held municipal elections in Chandigarh suggest that they are, it is a momentous shift in Punjab politics.

It means the people there are fed up with the binary of the Akali Dal and Congress that has dominated its politics for decades, ever since the state was formed. It wants to give the AAP a chance to tackle its many woes. It does not want the elderly, do-nothing, Amarinder Singh in another configuration. It rejects the noisy, Pakistan/Khalistan loving Navjot Sidhu, and the sudden emergence of Christian-Sikh Charanjit Singh Channi. It wont countenance the corrupt Badals yet again.

The AAP, according to the same poll, is expected to open its account in Uttarakhand and Goa as well. This stands in contrast with the efforts of Mamata Banerjee, a wannabe leader of the Oppositiongathbandhan,with or without Congress. The TMC, mighty electorally in West Bengal, where it defeated the BJP in a straight contest, making it an apparent giant killer, was trounced in neighbouring, largely Bengali-speaking Tripura. From all accounts, it is likely to do badly in Goa too. If the TMC remains confined to West Bengal electorally, can it properly aspire to a national role?

***

Also Read

How Arvind Kejriwal's AAP seeks to make inroads into Punjab ahead of Assembly polls

Why Arvind Kejriwal is in Punjab and who will be AAP CM face in the 2022 Assembly election

How Kejriwals gravy train is going places via Ayodhya, and why others are joining him too

***

So will these results, if they are borne out on election day, position Arvind Kejriwal as a dark horse prime ministerial candidate at the head of the Opposition alliance under formation?

The problem with Congress is that its leadership is unacceptable to many in the Opposition, despite its position in power, with its own chief minister in Rajasthan, Punjab and Chhattisgarh. This looks like it will be reduced to two. The Congress also supports the state governments in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, but with small potatoes.

Still, no Opposition alliance, as of now, can do without the Congress numbers if it keeps over 40 MPs after the general election of 2024. Even if it is reduced further, the arithmetic demands its inclusion. But Rahul Gandhi is not acceptable to many, even as the mother-son duo in Congress are unwilling to cede the leadership of both the party and the Opposition to anyone else.

Arvind Kejriwal is relatively young, IIT educated, an excellent orator in both Hindi and English. He has held a government job in the Income Taxs CBDT. And done considerable social work in his early activist career. He has won the Magsaysay Award. He has worked with Mother Teresa. He is already a two-term chief minister of Delhi with a thumping, absolute majority on both occasions.

Kejriwal has worked hard with his fellow party strategists to widen the AAP footprint, and now looks on the verge of succeeding, with a big-prize border state. Kejriwals desire to have control of a full-state under the Indian Constitution is about to be realised.

His politics is decidedly leftist and populist, but it resonates with a large section of the poor voting public, migrant labour, the largely powerless, the shirtless in an Eva Peronesque way. He also has quite a few adherents amongst the elite. Even if Kejriwal cannot break into leading the Opposition in 2024, he could be very well positioned by 2029.

India is largely in love with socialism. It does nothing for the economy, as Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal well know, but it keeps their cadres happy to receive regular handouts. Years of 2 percent GDP growth or less, plus double-digit inflation have not cured the Indian public of it.

Both West Bengal and the half-state of Delhi have precarious financials. Punjab is equally bad, but it is likely to wreck its finances further if the AAP takes over. It is a style of government that wilfully keeps the voter happy on borrowed money and by diverting funds from any other heads of account. A fair amount of corruption and slush money is also par for the course. Development is reduced to future promises and IOUs.

The Congress, in power for decades earlier, has bred this corruption, subsidy, freebie, loan-waiver culture into the political DNA of India, by always positioning this nation as a poor country. Foundation stones may be laid in profusion but projects were rarely completed.

The GDP growth and modernisation that the BJP has pushed is largely incomprehensible to Indias teeming millions. The IMF and World Bank might like our fiscal responsibility, as do foreign investors, but the vast public finds all this remote from its reality. And this includes quite a few in the middle class.

What it does understand is Hindutva and Hindu pride. It is this that has taken the BJP to the pole position and is likely to keep it there through 2024 and 2029. That is, as long as it remembers what works with its voting public fed up with minority appeasement. It wants a Hindu Rashtra as soon as possible.

But the rise of the AAP cannot be ignored. The public loves its style of apparent concern for the poorest. The BJP, like the Congress before it, must give away even larger tranches of money to please the electorate. And yes, have a two-tier system aimed at the have-nots and the haves.

The public at the bottom of the pyramid does not think it has the capacity to self-propel itself out of its poverty, even with government help. It has too many bullying local bosses. It possibly does not aspire to a better life that involves much hard work and uncertainty at the end of it.

The teach a man to fish logic that Prime Minister Narendra Modi believes in, has its counterpart in getting something just for existing. A significant section of the Indian public is not convinced about the concept of being given opportunities under various government programmes supported by government incentives and infrastructure. This model may have worked in Gujarat, but does not stand a chance in West Bengal and those who want to copy its electoral success and mass popularity.

The Indian way is to assimilate all influences into itself to strengthen its core. The best way to beat the AAP which has a long march ahead before it attains central power, is to outdo it at its own game. The BJP that rules in most of the states and at the Centre has immense resources to work with. If it puts a lot of it to work for Hindus, the AAP and TMC model of minority appeasement-cum-populism can be stemmed and confined.

The writer is a Delhi-based commentator on political and economic affairs. The views expressed are personal.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News,Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Link:

How Arvind Kejriwal has best chance to emerge on national scene and challenge BJP - Firstpost

More than any constitution or law, democracy rests on what the late political scientist Robert Dahl called a system of mutual security. Each side in the democratic contest must have confidence that the other side will play by the rules of the democratic game, accept defeat if that is its fate, and return to fight another day. The political fight must be restrained by mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual restraintrespect for the right of opposing political forces to contest and criticize, trust that the other side will not eliminate it if it comes to power, and restraint in the methods used to contest for and hold power. No democracy can long survive a political atmosphere devoid of these norms. Yet that is the abyss into which American democracy is descending.

One year ago today, the United States suffered its most serious brush with constitutional failure since the Civil War. Many things remain unknown about the tragic and horrifying assault on the U.S. Capitol. There is no doubt, however, about the scale of the violence or about how close the United States came to seeing the peaceful transfer of power sabotaged for the first time in the countrys history. The damage of former President Donald Trumps Big Liethat he did not really lose the 2020 presidential electionhas been poisonous and long lasting. Most Republicans and up to a third of the American public do not believe that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. And a variety of different polls, using varying wording and methodologies, have all documented a growing willingness of the American people to consider or condone political violence. When the polarization between two political camps reaches the point that each side regards the other as morally intolerable, as an existential threat to the countrys future, democracy is at risk.

The January 6 insurrection was neither the beginning nor the end of this descent. For some two decades, political scientists have been worrying about the growing polarization of American politics, as evidenced in rising congressional gridlock, an unwillingness to compromise, and the maximalist, take-no-prisoners tone of cable news, talk radio, and social media. Well before Trump began to use the power and prestige of the presidency to trample on democratic norms, ratings agencies noted a decline in the quality of U.S. democracy. Analysts at Freedom House have shown the decline unfolding steadily between 2010 and 2020, dropping the countrys freedom score by 11 pointsfrom 94 to 83on a 100-point scale. Due in part to eroding public trust in democratic institutions, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States to a flawed democracy in 2017. And in 2020, International IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance), a widely respected international think tank focused on democratic development, classified the United States as a backsliding democracy.

Among Washingtons democratic allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region, as well as many emerging democracies worldwide, there is mounting concern, even alarm, at the deeply troubled state of democracy in the United States. As Americans tear their own country apart, fragile democracies are retreating before a tide of illiberal populism, dictatorships in China and Russia are surging in power and ambition, and the norms and restraints of the postWorld War II liberal orderincluding the indispensable norm against territorial aggressionare crumbling. Last month, the Biden administration finally held its long-awaited Summit for Democracy to rally international resolve and push back against the illiberal tide. It was an important symbolic step, because despite the collective weight of the European Union and the geopolitical courage and generous assistance of small European democracies such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Norway, and Swedenwhich refuse to be cowed by China and Russiathe United States remains the worlds most important democratic bulwark. A global democratic countermovement will find its energy and conviction challenged, however, as long as it depends for leadership on a democracy as troubled as the United States. This is the paradox of global democracy today: the fate of freedom still rests on a deeply flawed and unstable democratic superpower. Inside that paradox rests a series of other paradoxesa set of sobering obstacles to the dream of global democratic renewal.

The first of these paradoxes is that reviving democracy in the United States requires depolarization and hence compromises that can bridge partisan divides and build coalitions from the center out. Compromise suggests a middle ground between two poles and actors on each side willing to seize that ground. But a key feature of the countrys democratic crisis is that one of the two major political parties is undermining the essential conditions for free and fair elections, particularly neutral and nonpartisan procedures for administering and certifying elections. In the year since January 6, numerous U.S. states have seen Republican legislators push and in some cases adopt laws enabling them to assert partisan control over the electoral process and thus possibly to reverse the results of a free and fair election. And even more states have adopted provisions that make voting more difficult for the kinds of people who tend to favor the other party.

There exists a legislative remedy to this threat to democracy: the Freedom to Vote Act, forged through compromise between progressive and moderate Democratic U.S. senators. It would address not only the rising dangers of voter suppression and partisan sabotage of the electoral process but two other scourges of American democracy, gerrymandering and dark money. It would bring American democracy at least somewhat closer to the standards of impartial, independent, professional election administration that make this vital function noncontroversial in wealthy democracies, such as Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and most EU members, and even in numerous less prosperous democracies, including Costa Rica, India, and Mexico.

Yet the Freedom to Vote Act lacks support from even a single Republican in the U.S. Senate. Hence it can be adopted only by removing one of the most arcane and dysfunctional features of American democracy, the Senate filibuster. This raises a second paradox. Although it has been for some two centuries a model and inspiration for emerging democracies, the U.S. system has grown stale in its resistance to reform and has failed to keep pace with global democratic innovations. The United States lacks many of the national institutions of accountability and good governance that are common in peer democracies, such as an independent anticorruption commission, a human rights commission, and an ombudsman to investigate citizen complaints. The country remains stuck with a first past the post electoral system that has been rigged for partisan advantage via redistricting and that is highly vulnerable to polarization, because it tends to entrench just two political parties: voters usually reject third-party options so that they do not waste their votes.

On January 6, the United States suffered its most serious brush with constitutional failure since the Civil War.

During much of the twentieth century, the two parties competed for median voters and kept more radical tendencies at bayalbeit at the horrible price of ignoring pervasive racial discrimination and Black disenfranchisement in the South. But as realignment occurred beginning in the late 1960s, parties became more coherent, primaries increasingly selected more partisan and ideological nominees, and congressional compromises got harder and harder to forge. In truth, however, the problem runs even deeper. In the Senate, the filibuster now blocks political reform, but institutional reform was slow even before the filibuster became (only in recent decades) an automatic requirement for legislation. Hence a third paradox: although the United States holds itself up as a model of democratic experimentation and adaptation, the U.S. Constitution is among the worlds most difficult to amend. Dramatic change often requires decades of advocacy and mobilization of the kinds that produced female suffrage and equal rights for racial minorities.

Of course, reform can happen incrementally, state by state. Alaska and Maine have recently adopted an electoral reform called ranked-choice voting, which offers real promise of reducing polarization. Under that system, it makes sense for independents and third-party candidates to run for office and for dissatisfied voters to vote for them, because no votes are wasted. Instead of voting for just one candidate, voters rank their choices, and if no one wins a majority of first-preference votes, the least popular candidates are eliminated and lower-preference votes are counted in instant runoffs until someone wins a majority. This and other options, including various systems of proportional representation that could replace first past the post in multimember congressional districts, offer the best long-term prospect of reducing the countrys polarization.

And then consider a fourth paradox: although voter suppression and electoral subversion now seriously threaten U.S. democracy, the countrys flawed electoral processes still offer the best hope of arresting democratic decay. Other countries have transcended this paradox to preserve or revive democracy. In India in the mid-1970s, Chile in the late 1980s, Mexico in 2000, and more recently in Peru, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Zambia, authoritarian regimes and illiberal forces were defeated through broad and resolute electoral mobilization. Today, opposition blocs in Hungary and Turkey are mobilizing to the same end, facing long odds against regimes that have stacked the decks in their own favor.

A crucial lesson emerges from these diverse circumstances. People do not generally cast their votes for or against democracy; the abuse of power has to get very bad and typically remain bad for a long time before it will become the dominant issue. So political forces seeking to defend or renew democracy must speak to other issues, in particular the economy, and they must craft the broadest possible coalitions in doing so. This requires going against the trend of polarization by showing respect for the concerns of people who previously backed illiberal options. In the 2019 municipal elections in Turkey, the opposition made stunning gains against the ruling authoritarian party by crafting just such an inclusive campaign. Leaders dubbed their strategy radical love. In Hungary, in the recent primary to nominate a candidate to face Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the coming parliamentary elections, the countrys disparate, six-party opposition coalition took a similar approach, choosing the centrist outsider Peter Marki-Zay, the mayor of a small provincial city. Marki-Zay is promising a return to Europe and accountable governmentbut with a populist edge.

And therein lies perhaps the most difficult and important paradox of all: sometimes, it takes a dose of populism to fight populism. Although successful pushbacks against illiberalism must bridge partisan polarization, they often triumph by condemning corruption and crony capitalism and by mounting appeals to economic fairness and inclusionpromises also made by aspiring autocrats, who abandon them once in power and divert attention from their policy failures and limitations through appeals to identity and cultural grievance. Democracys defenders need to avoid the brutal divisiveness, contempt for institutions, intolerance of pluralism, and exaltation of the leader that define illiberal populism. But they should try to energize voters by expressing moral outrage and empathy for peoples insecurity and loss and, when possible, by putting forward charismatic candidates who embody a message of change. Such a strategy lifted the environmental activist Zuzana Caputovato the presidency of Slovakia in 2019, and it now gives opposition parties a fighting chance of winning electoral victories in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.

Broadening the base of support for democratic reform is crucial, because authoritarians and illiberal democrats always seek to tilt the political playing field to a degree that requires the opposition to win a larger than normal victory. Oppositions that dismiss this dangerand fail to transcend their own divisions and alternative identity claimstypically falter.

As Americans tear their own country apart, fragile democracies are retreating before a tide of illiberal populism.

The January 6 insurrection was the product of a political climate, if not a political plot, intentionally produced by an authoritarian populist leader and movement. Trump may well seek a return to the White House, this time with a leg up in critical battleground states where his Republican allies have made it easier to invalidate the legitimate results of elections. To defeat his brand of populism, Democrats need to avoid militant appeals to identity-based grievances that illiberal populists seize on to paint Democrats as advocates of cancel culture, reverse discrimination, and efforts to defund the police. In addition to fighting against racial exclusion and prosecuting violent white nationalism, Democrats should borrow a page from New York City Mayor Eric Adamss playbook and get tough on crime. The radical right will seek to stoke racial anxiety in any case, but Democrats shouldnt make it easier for that message to resonate with swing voters.

In 2022 and 2024, elections must be squarely focused on the question of which party offers the people a fairer economic deal. Shifting away from identity politics would go against the grain of the moment, which is defined by demographic change and social media passions. It would require a disciplined focus on job creation, childcare support, early childhood education, health-care expansion, infrastructure investment, the new green economy, and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. The three Democratic presidents who managed to serve two full terms in the last centuryFranklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obamaall understood the need for a message of hope and optimism focused on bread-and-butter economic issues. Democratic success might also require a presidential candidate who can craft an outsider, anti-elite image more authentic and persuasive than the one Trump has perfectedbut shorn of illiberal tendencies. In the near term, that might be the hardest paradox for American democracy to overcome.

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January 6 and the Paradoxes of Americas Democracy Agenda: Why Protecting Liberalism Will Require a Dose of Populism - Foreign Affairs Magazine

Meanwhile, rapid antigen and PCR tests are still in short supply despite the White House being warned months ago that it needed to prepare to roll out stock. Federal vaccine mandates for large companies and health facilities are being challenged in court this week, the pandemic-fuelled economy remains fickle, and only 62 per cent of Americans are fully inoculated against COVID - far fewer than the nine out of 10 Australians who are double jabbed.

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Biden also made unity a central plank of his election campaign, portraying himself as a healer-in-chief who could mend the wounds of a deeply fractured nation.

We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature, he said in his inaugural address on January 20.

But Americas divisions didnt start and end with Trump, and the US today still feels as polarised and partisan as ever, on everything from vaccines and voting rights, to the Capitol building attack and critical race theory in schools.

Whats more, simmering tensions between Democratic progressives and moderates have reached boiling point, compounded last month by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchins decision to oppose Bidens $US2 trillion ($2.78 trillion) suite of reforms to healthcare, climate, immigration, education and tax laws.

Manchin, a Democrat centrist, cited concerns about growing federal debt and higher consumer prices as reasons to not support the Build Back Better bill in its current form. Not surprisingly, party progressives such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow members of the so-called Squad were livid.

As for the imminent global challenges?

In his first foreign policy speech as President, Biden declared that diplomacy was back, while singling out the advancing authoritarianism of China and Russia as geopolitical priorities.

But diplomacy is a high stakes game for a leader whose approval rating has been in free fall ever since the middle of last year, coinciding with the hasty withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

The relationship between the US and Russia was tested again last week, when Biden held a 50-minute telephone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to de-escalate tensions over Ukraine, ahead of talks between their respective officials this week. They each made threats, Biden warning the US would respond decisively if Russia invaded, while Putin, according to his office, said a breakdown in relations would be a colossal mistake.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden held a 50-minute phone call last week.Credit:AP

These are merely some of the challenges paving the way for a nail-biting midterm election year, which many expect will result in Republicans taking back Congress and further thwarting Bidens first-term agenda.

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After all, history suggests the party that wins the White House is not likely to also control the House of Representatives for a full term. Trump, for example, won office in 2016 but Republicans lost the majority in 2018; Obama became president in 2008 but Republicans took back the chamber in a landslide in 2010.

Boiled down, Democrats currently have 221 votes in the House, while Republicans have 213, and Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to lose more than three votes in the chamber to push through bills.

The 100-member Senate is evenly split, with Vice-President Kamala Harris holding the deciding vote if theres a tie.

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But in a somewhat ominous sign, 23 House Democrats have already announced they will not be seeking re-election this year. Little wonder Republicans are feeling confident about their prospects.

Biden, however, insists he is optimistic about the year ahead, and Democratic strategists say there are indeed good stories to tell: the $US1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that sent much-needed stimulus cheques to millions of people during the pandemic; bipartisan support for a $US1 trillion revamp of the nations infrastructure; the unemployment rate dipping to 4.2 per cent last month.

Maybe so, but much of the message does not appear to be cutting through. The extent to which Democrats can recalibrate and reframe the debate in the next few months will make all the difference for Bidens political fortunes this year and beyond.

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Bidens uphill battles against COVID, Putin and populism - Sydney Morning Herald

The future of American politics is taking shape, and it is frightening. I, along with many others, thoughtor at least hopedthat Joe Bidens tenure in the White House would allow enough Americans to unspool themselves from the daily efforts of outrage and apocalyptic thinking. Biden was bland enough that politics could revert to something more measured than it had been under his predecessor, Donald Trump. This was wishful thinking.

Politics seems more existential, not less. Pundits and partisans cast everything as a culture war, even those things that have little to do with culture. Policy debates that might have otherwise been boringover COVID-testing protocols or the cost of the Build Back Better bill, for examplehave become part of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil. As the conservative writer Jack Butler characterized the growing unease: Were in the battle at the end of time, and the prince of darkness is already at the door, and the whole world is now a contest between activist left and activist right.

In retrospect, it was a mistake to think that the sheer intensity of recent political debate was unusual or temporary, when it is likely to be neither. After a couple of relatively tame and boring decades, the shift made itself apparent during the Trump years. In 2012, 45 percent of Americans cited the economy as the most important problem facing the country. By 2017, that number had dropped to around 10 percent. The United States was far from exceptional, however. In 2018, immigration had become the top concern for voters in seven European countries, with terrorism following closely behind. The economy has since become a primary concern again, partly because of the pandemic. Yet economic debates themselves have become less polarized. There is broad agreement and even consensus across the ideological spectrum. In much of Europe, right-wing populist parties have taken a sharp left turn, positioning themselves as the true defenders of the welfare state and the working class.

The American right has lagged behind. Traditions of frontier libertarianism and trickle-down economics make old habits hard to shake. But this, too, is changing, helped along by Republicans growing indifference to deficit spending. Trumps embrace of far-right nationalist tropes has obscured the Republican Partys lurch leftward on economic issuesa shift that the writer Matthew Yglesias calls unhinged moderation. This impulse of right-wing identity politics and economic populism is inspiring a younger generation of conservatives on the new right, profiled recently by Sam Adler-Bell in The New Republic and David Brooks in The Atlantic.

David Brooks: The terrifying future of the American right

Trump was radical in style and, occasionally, on policyat least by conservative standards. He abandoned earlier Republican efforts to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare. His scrambling of traditional left-right politics gave license to young conservatives to embrace economic populism, which isnt very conservative. The influential journal American Affairsinitially launched as a quasi-Trumpist intellectual organwelcomes contributors from the other side and features more socialist ideas than unabashedly capitalist ones (I wrote an essay for the journal on formulating a new left-wing populism).

Various right-wing intellectuals have long fantasized about an electoral holy grail of economic populism and social conservatism. In Britain, they were known as red Tories, but such grand projects of realignment tended to fizzle out. They were compelling in theory but not necessarily in practiceperhaps until now. As the conservative writer and podcaster Saagar Enjeti argued in 2020: The whole reason that the GOP has been able to even compete for so long is that despite their horrible economics, they do hold the cultural positions of so much of the American people. But they keep thinking theyre winning because of their economic policy and losing because of their cultural policy, when really its the opposite.

As Democrats hemorrhage working-class supportnot only among white people but also among communities of color whom the party was counting onthe new right sees an opportunity. Glenn Youngkins victory in the Virginia gubernatorial elections was an early test case. Youngkin, a Republican, was happy to pledge increased spending on education, for example. Few in his party seemed to mind. What mattered was culture, which is precisely what the otherwise mild-mannered former executive zeroed in on in the campaigns final weeks. Education was the dividing line, but these werent your old Bush-era debates about charter schools, class size, teacher training, test scores, and budgets. Republicans may have weaponized the threat of critical race theory, but school closures and remote learning undoubtedly forced parents to pay closer attention to what their kids were actually learningor not learning. The divide wasnt about whether kids were solving their math problems; it was about values, history, and culturethe fear that the state, through its schools, was discarding the pretense of neutrality and instead promoting contested ideological propositions.

Whether this growing sense of cultural overreach by the left ultimately pushes Republicans to Ronald Reaganstyle electoral victories is an interesting question. An even more interesting question is what this shiftif it becomes permanentmeans for the future of American politics. And what it means is discouraging at best.

In effect, because of the GOPs dash to the center on spending as well as on industrial and trade policy, economics has been neutralized as the countrys primary partisan cleavage. To the extent that a left-right divide is still meaningful, it matters much more on race, identity, and the nature of progress than it does on business regulation, markets, and income redistribution. Because the former are fundamentally about divergent conceptions of the good, they are less amenable to compromise, expertise, and technocratic fixes. These are questions about who we are rather than what works.

Elites in both parties enjoy a certain privilegeone appropriate to a rich, advanced democracythat allows them to emphasize culture while deprioritizing economic well-being. Civilizational concerns gain more political resonance precisely as perceptions of civilizational decline intensify on right and left alike. But this particular kind of decadencecharacterized, per The New York Times Ross Douthat, by reproductive sterility, economic stagnation, political sclerosis, and intellectual repetitionis an ideal foil for young conservatives cum reactionaries. It gives them something worthy of reaction. And, importantly, it doesnt require being religious as much as it requires a recognition that religion is a vital societal good, regardless of whether its true.

Like Trump, the most secular president of the modern era, many of the new rights most prominent figures are not particularly religious. Their (potential) constituency of young Republicans isnt particularly religious either. The number of unaffiliated Republicans has tripled since 1990, much of that concentrated among the young and the relatively young.

Civilizational health, to use the term of the Claremont Institutes Matthew Peterson, is what unites believers and nonbelievers alike. They appreciate religions role and utility in buttressing Western civilization, offering as it does transcendence as well as tradition. And, of course, elevating religion as the wellspring of morality is a pretty good way to own the libs, for those who place special value on that.

If this division around morality, the meaning of the American founding, and civilization solidifies, we should all be at least slightly worried. It would mean a multifaceted culture war for, perhaps, the rest of our lives. Thats putting it somewhat dramatically, but there is good reason to view some changes, rather than others, as extremely sticky, if not quite permanent.

Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars

There wasnt always a left-right cleavage organized around class, redistribution, and the means of production. But it came to be, and it has persisted for a very long time. In their seminal 1967 study, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan argued that state formation, the industrial revolution, and urbanization allowed economic divides to supersede religious ones. That economic cleavages are (or were) paramount in most Western democracies, then, is no accident. Over time, the economic dimension of conflict in Western democracies became frozen in the form of parties that self-defined according to economic interests.

Parties play an important role too. They decide what issues to prioritize in order to distinguish themselves from the competition. As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague note, class is salient in any society, if, when, and only to the extent to which it is important to political parties which mobilize workers. But neither Democrats nor Republicans are likely to become workers parties anytime soon. Conservatives rhetorical interest in the working class remains largely electoral and opportunistic. Meanwhile, the left is preoccupied with language policing, elite manners, and a kind of cultural progressivism far more popular among hypereducated white liberals than working-class Latino, Black, Asian, and Arab Americans.

Republicans and Democrats may simply converge around a diffuse and vague economic populism and call it a day. To distinguish themselves from each other in a two-party system, they will have to underscore what makes them different rather than what makes them similar. And what makes them differentunmistakably differentis culture. This isnt just instrumental, though, a way to rally the base and mobilize turnout. If one listens to what politicians and intellectuals in these two warring tribes actually say, it seems clear enough: They believe that civilization is at stake, and who am I to not take them at their word? If the end of America as we know it is indeed looming, then the culture war is the one worth fightingperhaps forever, if thats what it takes.

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The Forever Culture War - The Atlantic