How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics
tribunemag.co.uk
tribunemag.co.uk
Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator, which dumbs it down a lot.
The competition is fierce, so small by small step parties push the boundaries. There's an inverse correlation between the results in the last election with the incentive to push the boundaries. So if you're losing by a wide gap, dumb it down and appeal to emotions even more. Then your competition is forced to react, hopefully not quick enough.
I've been a consultant in a company for political parties for a brief period of time in my country, and the level of technification and specialization is on par, if not better, with the best marketing campaigns in the private sector. I laughed when I saw the scandal about cambridge Analytica. IDK in the US but in Spain microtargeting and segmented audiences were already being used by that time.
It didn't feel right to me so I left before I made a year in it. It wasn't only my job, it was the people I had to speak with, the feeling after the meetings that we were in the hands of completely idiot sociopaths.
Democracy is by no means essentially populist. It is when it is in its sickly stages, maybe. It's also by no means necessarily dependent on elites; again that is an indication of the failure of democracy (and the arrival of money as speech).
It is very fair to say that few of the older democracies are keeping populism at bay -- India is failing at it, Britain has failed at it, Turkey has failed at it, etc.
I live in a country that became democratic around when I was born. I don't feel that as a young democracy we're doing a particularly good job at keeping populism at bay; I'd go so far as to say we're failing at it.
Sweden has been struggling with it recently, and Australia is pretty bad. Isle of Man does fine.
If anything, I think your examples prove why populism is inherent to truky democratic systems. To me, it's actually a sign of a well functioning, diverse society not only demographically but also ideologically. And that's imo pretty healthy - at least much more so than a permanent homogenous consensus.
(And in a democracy if elected politicians don't align with voters under the pretext of not bending to populist demands, someone else will do it. The job of politicians in a democracy is to represent the electorate, not the opposite.)
Democracy is essentially shared, representative decision making based on a set of shared values and rules which every participant subscribes to.
It's perfectly valid to promote your ideas and policies to your constituency with respect to the governing framework which is democracy. The mechanics may seem 'populist' e.g. campaigning, advertising, interviews,... but the fundamentals aren't challenged.
Populism, however, does challenge those fundamentals. And it does so by using the governing rules and values within a democratic framework to challenge that framework itself. Examples of that is relentlessly attacking press and journalism itself, or antagonizing political adversaries, rather then challenging ideas and policies in a respectful public debate. The really insidious part are leveraging tactics that veil these as paramount to the sustainability of democracy.
In that regard, democracy is innately flawed. It doesn't nor can't stop the rise of populists who push democracy out of the door. Ultimately, it's a social construct which people actually have to subscribe to. And if environmental circumstances change - e.g. economic recessions, social inequalities, existential threats,... - a critical mass within a population can grow which no longer is willing to subscribe to that construct.
Or, worse, assumes that the alternative they subscribe to is democratic by nature when it is anything but democratic. History has an abundance of autocratic states who use 'democratic' or 'people' in their own naming e.g. the German Democratic Republic.
Democracy is always at odds with the social-economic dynamics and the formation of cultural and economic elites which hold de facto power and have plenty incentives to leverage political power in order to retain a status quo. Democracy doesn't overcome that, and never will.
However, what democracy does have going for itself is that it enshrines and protects an important set of fundamental freedoms and rights which apply to everyone regardless of their position in society.
So in very unequal societies with a semblance of democracy, like in South America (and it's slowly coming to USA as well), you get these right and left populist oscillations, as different classes (upper and lower) seek to gain all political power. I don't think anybody has figured out an effective way yet how to dampen these oscillations in a society, and equalize it, so it would return to the ideal democratic mode.
I don't see that (I live here).
The UK has had a two-party system for at least 60 years. The Conservative Party is much the same as it was under Margaret Thatcher: xenophobic, opposed to public expenditure. The Labour Party is currently in the grip of people who admire Tony Blair's policies (interventionism, focus groups, and triangulation).
Labour had a brief phase of mass-movement socialism under Jeremy Corbyn, who might be tagged "populist", but didn't deserve that tag. The current Conservative Party is led by a would-be populist; but the rest of the party doesn't seem to admire him very much. The only real populist much in evidence recently was Nigel Farage, who seems to spend more of his time in US TV studios than on UK TV.
"India is failing, Britain has failed" makes it sound as if UK politics is dominated by pogroms, temple-burnings and riots - as if British society is in a worse state than Indian society. That's far from the truth.
I also live here.
Brexit is evidence of a failure of democracy to contain populism. It is absolutely not in our national interest, is already harming us, was almost certainly bankrolled by dark money and foreign influence campaigns, used unlawful tactics and above all was driven by systematic populist xenophobia.
As you live here you will also have received the leaflet that tried to show the threat of Turkey joining the EU (with a map that didn't mark out Turkey but did mark out Iraq and Syria) even though Turkey is no closer to achieving membership now than it ever was -- this was vile populist manipulation.
Boris runs Number 10 as if it is unaccountable to parliament. He flings out bread-and-circuses distractions when his mendacious lying is exposed. He deliberately deployed a populist smear in parliament for which he won't apologise in parliament, and people around him rallied to support it as he doubled down.
We are heading into a criminalisation of dissent and protest that even Maggie wouldn't have tried. We have a government implementing serious voter suppression based on untruths.
And we have a populist leader of a government that is increasingly corrupt, who rode into power on a Brexit wave who does not believe the rules apply to him (and who has evidence to support it, given how many last-last-last-chances he's been given to "shape up") and a ruling party that appears to be swimming in Russian influence money in a manner so severe that our "special relationship" partner has openly rebuked us for it, and so damaging that our prime minister buried a report into it.
Boris is engaging in Trumpian tactics and his party seem unable to do a thing about it; the frog is being boiled just the same way as it (still) is in the USA.
We're in enormous trouble.
(And what is really striking to me is that the bulk of the criticism I have typed above is apolitical; members of his own party have levelled essentially all of these criticisms).
Look at the bright side of it, now we can spend some of that money on the NHS!
There seems to be a tendency here to contrast "populism" with "democracy".
I don't think either term is well-defined. "Democracy" is usually taken to mean electoral democracy, whether PR of FPTP; "populism" is a vaguer term, commonly used as an insult to hurl at your adversaries. But I take it to refer to the espousing of policies that appeal to ignorant people, but don't make sense.
Those two things are orthogonal; if populists win the most votes in a democratic election, the winner is both democratic and populist.
I completely agree that the PM is a populist, and that his government is corrupt.
For what it's worth, I think it's a good thing that his party has so far been unable to unseat him. He is the Labour Party's greatest asset (especially so, given that Keir Starmer's main spiel is attacking Johnson and his antics and lies).
I'm no admirer of either the Tories or Starmer's centrist Labour. I'm just saying that while I don't think Labour can win under Starmer, I think the Tories can lose, if they don't dump Boris soon. Regrettably, I don't think there's any prospect of Labour dumping Starmer.
I hear this from people a lot, and if you'll allow me to be blunt, I think this position is insane, when the country is heading into exactly the kind of omnicrisis that birthed people like Orbán. The longer we have a prime minister and a cabinet of loyalists who are happy to serve up bigoted, lunatic "red meat" strategies to "Save Big Dog", the less recoverable our situation is.
And the longer he stays around, the greater the chance of the kind of staff turnover that leads to kakistocracy. Why would anyone who is actually good at their job and keen to carry out a public service stay around to take the blame and get even more dirty with scandals not of their making?
It's like Trump didn't happen.
So who do you think is most likely to replace Boris as PM, if he is kicked out? Truss? Sunak?
Frankly, I prefer incompentent corrupt Tory leaders to competent corrupt Tory leaders. Boris is an albatross around the Tories' neck, and if they do remove him, it'll be because they can see that he's a liability. It's good if the Tories are encumbered by a clown.
It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown. That is the wrong way to look at him, not least because clowning requires empathy.
Good luck with that! I don't think he has a snowflake's (and I don't think he'd run). Sunak will bring back austerity and handouts for bankers (Sunak is a banker).
> It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown.
I agree that he's not so green as he's cabbage-looking. He's not stupid. But he does treat everything as a joke, including his own hair. At any rate, I don't think it's important to internalise anything about Boris; I'm pretty sure he's finished.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tom-tugendhat...
As to a snowflake's, as of a week ago when the prospect of a contest really emerged, the betting markets thought his chance was 16/1 and now his odds are between 6/1 and 9/1 depending on where you look. Not far off Truss's odds.
Not a snowflake's -- he's in fourth place and it's more like we need to see whether Jeremy Hunt will run or endorse. Tugendhat has pull in the national party (even if half of the parliamentary party hate him for being a "swot" -- i.e. actual public service instead of a PPE degree and some time at a hedge fund). I think if Hunt decides not to run, there is a good chance he gets to take it to the country.
I would observe that Jeremy Corbyn started out with longer odds in the 2015 Labour leadership campaign.
Boris's hair is not a joke. Nothing about his appearance is a joke. It is carefully crafted to maximise his innate characteristics and play up to a distracting stereotype. He had his flat done up for £100,000 by an exclusive designer, his wife is a smart dresser, and he is surrounded by PR people. Everything about the way Boris looks and acts is planned. Understand that he's a sociopath. And sociopaths do what they do. This will be a rough contest.
But the acceleration of the problems in just two years of Boris's regime is a failure of democracy to repel populism and the attacks on institutions that populism demands.
This is probably because $$ and internal power struggle mostly decides policy, which is A) not democratic, and B) opens the door for political movements which represent policies outside of the elite overton window.
If I decide to join the X party as opposed to the Y party, this is supposedly because my mind is already set, and X policies align more with my set of preferences than Y policies.
Failure to listen and adapt, if anything, tells more about how Western politicians are increasingly worse at being politicians, (i.e. at achieving tangible policy goals evaluated according to their own set of preferences).
Dedicated activists are kind of rare as politicians. I can think of a few but not many, and they normally become politicians precisely because they're fighting for a popular cause that mainstream elites are suppressing.
So yeah, they want power and status because they are humans. They join party X as opposed to party Y because that's their preferred direction.
I was saying that it's more common for ideology to be an afterthought for most high level politicians rather than the primary reason (as you previously asserted) they get into politics.
You'd expect that it would mean less intransigence about policy in the face of democratic pressures, but it doesnt. Probably because money is the real driver.
I personally know one politician who was part of a mainstream party politics for years and his ideology was... fluid at best. He ran for election and lost and was almost immediately shunted into a safe, well paid job at a corporate NGO where he rabbits on about sustainable investment.
After digging into the personal stories of many other people in this "left" party I realized that his story was completely normal. The candidate in my area was a black woman pulled from a public relations company linked to the party elites. She speaks with the veneer of ideology (vaguely and on "safe" topics) but it's obvious that it's ambition that drove her.
After all, if I want the support of gun rights/abortion rights voters, a clear statement of unwavering support will get it - whereas a wishy-washy "I could be convinced either way" will leave them looking for someone more steadfast.
But that doesn't stop me changing my positions in order to win votes. Plenty of politicians flipped their stances on rowdy protests between BLM and Jan 6th. Plenty flipped their stances on "my body, my choice" during the pandemic. And anyone with a 20+ year political career will have updated their stances in that time.
Coincidentally, zero donors to the Democratic party will be inconvenienced by this stance.
If you look at Medicare for all it's supported by 52% of Republican voters and 7/10 of voters in general. It's pretty much the definition of an electable policy.
Now, why do you think it might be such a fringe view in the Beltway? Why did Obama write it off as a non starter?
If a policy became super popular and no donor interests were threatened by it, yea, it has a decent chance of being promoted and passed.
Joe Lieberman.
Many of these things can't be modeled from first principles, as nice as it would be to have a simple theory of everything for politics without involving individuals and second, third, etc order effects.
This... doesnt even begin to make any sense.
It's heartening to me that 50-70% of American voters generally support every sensible policy you can name. Many of them are in no real danger of getting passed though.
Here's an article that covers the research and some critiques. The criticism seems a bit absurd to me, the bit about the rich being successful in convincing people of what they want only makes things worse, yet is presented as if it undermines the research.
Only because no one can actually agree on what it means. Which goes to it actually not being passable.
"Medicare for all" has essentially turned into a marketing term.
Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity, but that would mean fighting over the meaning, and that would reveal that many people are actually very against certain aspects of it, like funding sources, covering controversial procedures, or even where to draw the line of what's "healthcare". Is OTC medicine? Exercise equipment? Healthy food? Housing?
Everytime you include or exclude any particular policy, you lose some support.
So it ends up being this catch 22 where politicians really want to cash in, but can't figure how to do it without causing the stock to crash.
Take the medicare bill. Strike the words "over 65". Provide funding.
It's not complicated. It can be MADE complicated, but intrinsically it is not.
>Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity
Yeah, provided they dont lose their campaign financing doing it - which they will.
Over the past few years I learned Russian and started watching Russian/Ukrainian popular TV and following political writers on all ends of the spectrum. Yes the media environment in Russia is far more authoritarian. But like a tightly-knit academic community, it is also far more intelligent. The nuance and the depth of discourse found on the average popular Russian political talk show (even state channels like Russia 1) is far beyond anything I have ever seen in America, with the exception of some independent podcasters and niche communities like Hacker News and academic think tanks. And the Russian elite lament this[1] because they cannot engage their American counterparts as peers, everything has to be rewritten in the language of CNN/Fox even during high-level state negotiations.
[1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-t...
In my opinion, even if this hypothesis is correct, these ‘more intelligent’ discussions try to build upon inherently two-dimensional authoritarian picture, with carefully controlled inputs. Results of these discussions have very little touch with actual reality. It’s like existing in parallel reality.
To give one example, the common complaints about the coastal elites and metropolitans. Its harder to get away with that if you have a democratic system that counts peoples votes since those groups include a lot of people.
By your theory, the political conversation should be worst in the countries ranked most democratic, which I don't feel fits the facts as well as the opposite.
I didn't say the political discourse was "worse", I said it appeals to the lowest common denominator. The crowds are finicky and have a short attention span, but sometimes they may happen to be correct. And sometimes they're not.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-19/woke-m...
Other than that the author makes a boatload of assumptions. South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, Nagarno karabakh, etc in recent memory but somehow he believes the Americans would not consider anything close based on this conjecture?
I don't think much of Alexander Nix and I think he did a terrible job of defending himself. He just let himself be framed into a defensive position and didn't really question it.
https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Because what you are saying might be how it is today (especially in america), but it doesn't have to be like that.
The book I mentioned tries to explain why, and I think it does a good job at it.
In the covid era, we get both!
Media are just well, a medium to deliver the "offer". The real fight is about handouts, especially the short-term ones. Pork barrelling is still effective at winning the elections.
I think old school they A/B tested using focus groups and so policy took a long time to get to Policy-Voter-Fit... but now that we have microtargeting, it's compressed these timelines by factors. You see this as politicians can announce something in the morning to then compeletly backflip by lunchtime.
... though I don't see this political hyperism letting up. In fact, I believe it will not only get even faster but will change from a passive targeting of ads to actively manipulating of content to individuals in order to slowly cause an action i.e make a politician or union member think a certain way, get a competitor's employee to perform a certain task etc.
Education and social discourse have decayed such that even so-called elites are ignorant destroyers of civilisation.
"'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind." -- Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act 4 scene 1
That's not really what populism means. The essence of populism is deep distrust for deliberative mechanisms and, more generally, for any efforts at endowing political decision making with desirable qualities such as intellectual depth, moderation, nimble adaptation to circumstances, compromise among opposing views, etc. etc. Populism is, in many ways, a clear failure mode of politics.
There's a reasonable case to be made that anti-democratic propaganda led to World War II and more democracy was one of the safeguards put in place to prevent repeats.
The simple answer is yes, it does. "Democratic peace" is one of the most solid empirical results in International Relations. (Of course, "democratic" here has to be understood as including broadly liberal/freedom-promoting norms. Electoral politics on its own is beside the point.)
It's cultural values that prevent war, not politics. Democracy is a machine for warfare if the people (or its leaders) like war.
In other words, "democracy leads to less war" so long as by "democracy" you actually mean the polar opposite of actual democracy, which is electoral politics. It's orthogonal to, and frequently opposed to, those "liberal/freedom-promoting norms" which you correctly observe are actually responsible for peace. If you want peace you can't just introduce "democracy" in the form of elections and voting—you have to change the culture to respect natural rights and value freedom even when doing so in a particular situation may be contrary to popular sentiment.
In a society which endorses "liberal/freedom-promoting norms" the influence of democracy is minimal as power resides with free individuals making decisions for themselves and not the collective, and it makes little difference whether the few remaining issues—which naturally exclude anything which might infringe on individuals' natural rights—are decided by direct vote, elected representatives, or self-appointed leader(s).
The issues which are subject to political decision making are anything but "few" or "unimportant". Even in the most freedom-loving society, you're going to need some mechanism to discipline policy makers when they make bad decisions. Electoral politics is one convenient way of doing that - it's anything but perfect, but by and large it's what we're all familiar with.
The point was that there wouldn't be very much in the way of "policy" in a society grounded in a culture of liberty and freedom. A "government" which is bound to respect everyone's natural rights at all times is really nothing more than a corporation or co-op (either for-profit or non-profit). It can't levy taxes or impose regulations on non-members, or force anyone to become or remain a member against their will. Whatever "policies" it might decide on, it can't compel anyone else to follow them. The way to "discipline policy makers" in such a system is simply to cancel your membership, and perhaps switch to a competing organization—and this option is available to you regardless of how the organization makes its decisions.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to employing democracy in this way, just as co-ops may have elected leaders or shareholders may vote on proposals offered by a board of directors. There are times to seek consensus and work through issues as a group, just as there are times for clear, unified leadership. But if someone wants to sign up with an organization with an "autocratic" leader who doesn't care about anyone else's opinion, that's fine too—provided they don't force their system on anyone who doesn't choose to follow them.
There will still be some populists, but it's not mainstream. Populists will usually not rule, their points of view cannot be merged into a coalition agenda.
I think most people in the US are completely unfamiliar with this type of politics. It's a type of politics where extremists do not win, and where centrism is the norm.
The country I'm in currently has a coalition of 4 parties, which still only barely gives a majority.
During campaigns, none of these parties can carry out the extremely aggressive politics as seen in the US where you smear the other at any and all cost. Because if you do, you won't be part of the coming coalition. This dynamic means that campaigning largely means telling the story of your party, instead of mud slinging other parties.
Blocking other parties for the sake of blocking the other party ("owning" them) in the senate or otherwise will be remembered. If you're unreasonable and childish, you won't be considered for the next coalition.
Getting a majority and then intentionally undoing the progress from the previous coalition is also frowned upon. It's another red flag for a future coalition.
So politics is building bridges and finding consensus amidst all players.
In a well functioning democracy with more economic equality and less corporate influence this is much less the situation.
politics is more intense due to lower standards of living due to the drastic slowdown in technological innovation and more competition for finite resources due to globalization. Both sides are trying to find somebody to blame for that. Right tends to blame immigrants, left tends to blame the rich. Both are just scapegoating essentially, the oldest trick for leadership failure in human history.
when people's lives are getting better and they are doing well they they don't really give a shit about politics. Very few revolutions happen during economic booms, they happen during depressions. People are upset right now because they can very clearly see they are working harder than their parents and grandparents for a lower quality of life.
The other aspect of this is that it's relative, a lot of human happiness is based on who you compare yourself to. With social media everybody can see how the richest really live and it pisses them off. Ignorance is bliss to some degree
Asking out loud:
Is voter profiling basically k-means clustering?
Given the USA's FPTP elections, k=2. (Per Duverger's Law.)
Quick peek at wiki wrt Spain's govt, featuring a parliament and using plurality block voting, apparently yielding k=7.
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I've also participated in politics (campaigns). But I have zero idea how our consultants do their profiling and targeting. Closely guarded secrets.
I recently read Jill Lepore's book If/Then about the history of Simulatics Corporation and their initial voter behavior modeling efforts and opinion polling. One of my takeaways is that Cambridge Analytica is just the 2016's iteration of the evergreen quixotic effort to model, predict, shape voting behavior. As you said, just like marketing.
I couldn't find the initial research papers online. (I haven't yet made the pilgrimage to my uni's library.) Nor do I know how outfits like dataforprogress.org work.
Would love to find a primer on this stuff. Because I have questions.
What is a wedge issue, really? The stuff Karl Rove is famous for. Did he identify wedge issues? Or did he just recycle tropes and use advanced targeting? Or maybe it's case-by-case? Like racial animus is evergreen whereas angst over abortion became a fault-line over time.
How malleable are the clusters? Ezra Klein in Why We Are Polarized argues there's some kind of feedback loop happening. People sorted, adopted the positions of their new cluster mates to align more closely, then became polarized. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Can we do the opposite analysis? Identify unifying issues to counterbalance the wedge issues?
Sorry, I could go on, but this is enough for now.
I was supposedly an assistant with the data pipeline but in the end was pretty much in charge of 90% of it's logic. Devs made the scrapers and some automated data adquisition, that got dumped into a data lake, I took the data from the data lake, I made a huge DB of voters with many columns (+30 don't remember exactly) from which I made a ruleset for initial clustering, based on conversations with creatives and operations and some of my own ideas, and that data got used for Ads people and operations people (basically, the ones that handle campaigns and volunteers). I know that devs eventually made a nice front-end for it, but it was basically ETL work, and instead of "buyer persona" it was kinda "voter persona".
It was fairly sofisticated and honestly, it worked pretty well.
Practically, IRL, people are not acting politically very much. Not more than 15 years ago around me at least. And certainly not the ones that are screaming on the internet.
Anecdotally, those who are politically active in my circle (choosing what they buy, protesting, helping a category of living beings, writing to politicians) are actually not active on social media. They don't have time or energy for that, so they prioritize. If you don't know them, you don't know about what they do.
So there is a lot of political outrage, virtue signaling, pavlov reacting and tribalism.
But I don't think in reality people are hyper politics. They talk a lot of about the fashionable rant du jour, but have no dept, and it's not followed by actions.
The article is mentioning that medias are becoming hyper politics, and on that I can agree. Social medias, but even sites for fun like imgur.
And the corporation world as well, because a temporary outrage can make people superficially act against them for a limited amount of time, which will impact trust. In an economy where value is decorelated from what you really do, an ephemeral spike can tank you. But on the long run, those same people will forget about everything quickly, and revert back to their old patterns. They are not politically commited, they are just being even more manipulated than before.
If you tried to serve a black customer in many places in the MLK era, it would have been trouble for your job.
In France, the big blue collar companies have on constant display political messages from the various left leaning CGT and Lutte Ouvrière. You may very well be pressured to join.
I my clients companies at least, I don't see the trend going up or down. It's pretty much as political as it used to be.
You may not see "virtual" actions as "real actions", but they can have dire consequences to the virtual part of someone's life.
Trend is the virtual part of life will be more and more relevant from now on.
I'd argue "virtual" political action is as relevant - or maybe even more, to some - as real political action.
I guess my point is more that political used to imply some stakes from the person involved. Because if you believe in something without having some skin in the game, you don't really believe in it.
Now a day, outrage on the internet cost nothing to the trolls and raging people. In fact, it's pleasant to them.
So I have a hard time considering that political.
But maybe I should just be more flexible.
> In the years after 2008, the political Ice Age which had followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall began, steadily, to thaw.
This ignores that the process of transitioning towards hyper-politics has been going on for quite some time in the U.S. from Gingrich's hyper-partisan speakership in the '90s to the War on Terror (remember that?) throughout the '00s, not to mention the brief spark of the anti-globalization movement in the late '90s during the WTO protests, there was a lot going on before the great recession. The End of History ended on 9/11, far before 2008, and certainly before 2016!
I think the real demarcation line is that until very recently, there was exactly one political prescription: deregulate, reduce tax, and reduce state expenditure. The only question was, how much? Every major political party essentially agreed with this basic formula, which had the attached slogan 'there is no alternative', and if you suggested an alternative, the media would castigate you for being some kind of pie-in-the-sky radical.
Trump, amongst others, kind of blew that whole idea up.
Regarding popular culture, you're totally right. I think on a grassroots level, politics never went away. It just got excluded from public discourse.
The second invasion of Iraq was a drastic sea change. Many of America's traditional allies (France, Germany) rejected it. China and Russia condemned it. The U.N. was not behind it. It was preemptive and extrajudicial.
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h...
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,543800,...
Reading the editorials above, it's eerie how we've never left the post-2003 era. The technology has advanced, but the polarization remains the same.
Tax and state expenditure are relatively constant everywhere in the world[1], and there is no definite downward trend anywhere. If everyone were truly ideologically brainwashed into reducing government size, wouldn't have they done a better job at that?
[1] https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm#in...
1. The Cause of Labor is the Hope of the World.
2. Sheila Rowbotham - My Life in Women's Liberation (I haven't read it, but probably a humane and contemplative article)
3. Grace Blakely - The Radical Message of Christian Socialism (me: can it be resurrected?)
4. Anton Jager - From Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics (this nostalgic article)
5. Sarah Sultana - Why the Left should Reclaim Freedom
They're so nice and comfortable and old-timey. They're all longing for the good old days. It's like curling up under a blanket with a cup of tea.
Weird how things become conservative.
I attribute this to political parties and their media campaigns which includes sound bytes from interviews, jabs at each other via social media, etc. not just during election season.
I think there is solid reasoning that the vast majority of the public doesn't differ on much, when it comes to policies, so the divisive politics are used to push people towards one party or another - at least here in our two party system in the US.
The 1% donate/fund (via PAC's, etc.) the political candidates and expect legislation that will favor their interests/companies. It takes 10's of millions of dollars (maybe over $100 mil) to effectively run a campaign for some seats in Congress. Candidates aren't getting that amount from individual middle class donors. This isn't a conspiracy theory, its just how it works. The 1% and politicians don't want their status changed and use money to keep it going.
The political divisiveness keeps the 60% of the people that are in the lowest financial brackets divided. I think the US is approaching a point where people (probably not software/startup people) are sick of the financial divide. Sick enough that they might get off their keyboard driven outrage. If they found common ground and united together, the 1% doesn't stand a chance. It doesn't take much effort for politicians to find issues to get people riled up about. Social media makes their job much easier too. That's why we see outrage and protests about masks, when that subsides as a divisive topic they will go back to old topics like guns, etc.
What if there were protests about workers rights (i.e. healthcare, wage inequality, time off, etc.)?
This is the main issue as far as I'm concerned. What the author refers to as hyper-politics is basically the unfortunate and dangerous re-emergence of transcendental concerns into the strictly temporal mechanisms of 20th century political organization.
This is extraordinarily concerning.
For more on the emergence of contemporary hyper-politics from an American perspective, I found Joshua Mitchell's "American Awakening" particularly helpful.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-0...
This leads to situations where some people cannot even say the phrase "Black Lives Matter", and where "Wokeness" is a crisis. Every crisis must have a counter crisis. I don't think this is particularly new, but I think social media has magnified the personal impact.
I don't think that "both sides" thinking is relevant or helpful; I do think that stories of personal experience based on shared principles can help. Among other things, strong partisan divisions are currently a winning way to raise money.
What? People say it all the time. If anything, you get argued with if you try to say "Black Lives Matter, but Non-Black Lives Just Might Matter Too", and it's hard to describe that as anything but an arms race of self-righteousness.
They don’t affect 99% or your lives anyway and the 1% that it does effect is tiny.
Hopefully people will wake up and understand that what matters is your action in your own home and business - that has the most changes on your life.
All the SJW stuff, BLM and all that stuff does not really change personal lives.
And what improves the earth most of all is when your personal life improves - because it improves everyone else’s lives around you.
I have to take issue with this and ask: Says who? Or where?
The media - who rightfully should not be trusted - tells us we're all so polarized. And that's gospel? Are there extremes? And is it good for politicians and "journalists" to build narratives around them? Yes, of course.
That aside, at least in the USA, the two party system - which is not required by the Constitution - leaves little grey area. You are either Red or Blue, or so you are told (by the parties and the politicians) it's that simple. (Hint: Often, no it's not.) Nothing is complicated. Nothing is nuanced. Just Red or Blue. That's silly.
But rather than try to surface the finer points we are fed narrative after narrative of oversimplification. Don't talk. Don't discuss. Red or Blue.
I'm not so sure about "intensely" (e.g., there were Obama voters who eventually voted for Trump), but we are definitely shortly encouraged to take a binary position in a non-binary reality.
As a citizen of Germany I would have classified Trump as the epitome of populist politics (not that there are a myriad other examples around the world).
Not sure what to make of the phrase 'populist decade' and what specific context or definition I seemingly am lacking.
Maybe it’s just my politics, but it seems to me that whatever your politics, the lack of a functioning middle leaves us all worse off. I know a number of Americans that feel the same, though whether there are enough of them to make a difference I don’t know.
Also, a lot of pressure on Johnson comes from the press and opposition claiming that any competent leader should be able to achieve things that are likely impossible and that no-one else in the Western world has, like solve the cost of living crisis, prevent large numbers of people from dying of Covid, and stop new Covid variants from coming into existence by vaccinating the world. It's amazing how many people falsely think the UK has the worst Covid deaths per capita in Europe rather than middle of the pack, just because all the headlines carefully cherry-pick whatever narrow figure makes the UK look worse. Then there's all the endless articles about how much other European countries are doing to protect people from high energy costs which mysteriously neglect to compare how much they're actually paying for power. And of course, the current vaccines can't stop new variants both because they don't stop Covid spreading nearly enough and because most of the unvaccinated global population already has natural immunity anyway, plus the UK doesn't have a pharmaceutical industry big enough to supply the world (we're not an empire anymore!) Any successor to Johnson will have expectations placed on them that they couldn't possibly live up to, which is probably why no-one is keen to try and take his place.
There's also been a lot of attacks on the government lately for "wasting" money by buying more PPE than ended up being used in the end. Imagine trying to do any kind of emergency planning when the political climate is like that.
I think the point is that the countries that have worse deaths-per-capita are poor (eastern european states), conspicuously dysfunctional (Belgium), or both dysfunctional and unlucky (Italy).
The UK was positioned to do well (it's an island, has a national health service, very low vaccine hesitancy, had lots of warning), and yet did badly both on deaths and the economy. The story of the UK and covid was one of unforced errors, not of an impossible challenge.
PS: probably most importantly, the UK has a relatively young population (median age 40, vs Italy at 46, Germany at 49, etc).
In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).
The continuing perception also probably comes down to the personality of Boris Johnson. You can't go around shaking hands, calling it 'kung flu', party through the lockdowns, then expect people to see you as an ideal leader in an emergency situation.
I fully agree with this.
> In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).
But not this.
The Czech Republic began to handle Covid badly before vaccination was even possible; it's not sensible to blame their low vaccination rates for their troubles.
You only have to look at the speed with which things went wrong in Autumn 2020 (and the fact that their early autumn death rate peak was as bad as their mid-winter death rate peak, unlike most countries with mitigations in place) to see that their problem was fundamentally that they had failed to act politically in the quieter summer months; complacency is the issue.
This was pretty widely reported-on in the media at the time; people were very surprised at how the mask-wearing success story had messed it up so badly.
By that time even the UK was culturally better prepared for accepting restrictions; our autumn wave was considerably blunted by them.
Believing the worst was over, ignoring nascent evidence that it was not, and constructing policy around that belief, and then reversing it when the truth entered the chat also explains our lurching bouts of competence and incompetence in the UK.
The idea we could close borders unilaterally before anyone else did is, I'm afraid, nearly delusional. It is a populist fantasy.
We have the worst deaths per capita largely because of the interconnectedness (not the density) of our populations; it is not how many people live in one place, but how many people live in one place and work in another.
This is for example part of why the Czech Republic, which is not at all a poor state -- it has a very low rate of poverty, low unemployment and high rates of GDP growth -- did so incredibly badly, after an initial phase of successful mask-wearing. No matter what you do, when your population is so heavily interconnected within itself and with its neighbours, complacency kills.
Median age plus the proportion of multigenerational families and homes in multiple occupation) is what made things so bad for Italy. The latter -- multiple families and multiple generations in single dwellings -- is also one of the complicating factors for the north of England vs the south.
Many things in Japan were advantageous (a culture that leans more towards collectivism and social thinking) but considering it's now abundantly obvious that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus, I suspect it will come down more to pre-established habitual mask-wearing and the higher-tech air conditioning that Japan needs to function.
We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time, and this is mirrored in the fact that most of Europe kept its borders open to us for long periods of time. We could have been isolated from the start, but in practice that was selective.
I've been traveling in and out of the UK throughout the pandemic, and my observation is:
- You don't have to close borders to have strong controls. The 'PCR test before travel' + 'test on day 2 and 8' would have been pretty robust if implemented at the right time.
- These measures were consistently implemented at the wrong time. For instance, when the delta wave was starting, there were no restrictions. When it was peaking in the UK, there were strong controls, even when you were coming from a country with a low incidence rate.
[0]: across the board, not exclusively in regards to travel.
Absolutely this.
The reason is Boris Johnson. I mean, quite literally. There is a cycle of him lurching between different Churchillian aspects -- freedom-and-damn-them-all-to-hell to fight-them-on-the-beaches and back. And he only ever changed to the latter position after the evidence was unavoidable, because he's psychologically incapable of thinking about anyone but himself and how history would perceive him personally.
He is absolutely the fundamental reason why this country can only act out of expedience and urgency.
I just checked, the deaths per million, the difference in the UK and France is of 0.03% (yes, 0.03%, basically 300 more people/million died in the UK than France).
ps: not even British, but hate selective cherry picking.
For fiction's sake: if France only had 50 deaths/million and according to your "only 300 more people/million more" the UK would have 350 deaths/million, that's "only 0.03% more" but geez, 7x more deadly in the UK than in France!
According to [1], the UK has so far 2351.99 deaths/M and France has 1868.02. The rate of death is 26% higher in the UK.
And that's 0.186% vs 0.235% rate of death. 0.049% (or even 0.03% from your data) is still a big jump.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
So, based on your data: Country | total deaths | population (mm) | % death France: | 125,269 | 67.06 | 0.186% UK: | 157,194 | 66.83 | 0.235%
I don't care so much about the % higher when we are dealing with these kinds of numbers. Is the same as 'eating red meat increases your changes of colon cancer by 10%!!!!` and then you see it increased it from 0.01% to 0.011% (or something like that).
For me, you can find a million explanations for that small difference in the numbers, and I doubt it can be attributed to UK's government handling of the situation.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
I guess I should start saying my net worth is about 0.1% lower than Jeff Bezos', on the 10E+16 scale or whatever the correct number maybe, I should ask you, you're better at maths.
Is there a decline in the amount of gas? "We" have been exporting vast amounts of natural gas, and over the past two years the amount has increased enormously - I say "we" in quotes because it's exported from the UK but not sold by the govt, rather it's not regulated so the private companies which extract it are free to sell to whoever they want.
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/uk-exporting-gas-despit... https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/01/31/how-did-the-uk-man...
I agree it'll be hard for an immediate successor to recover in the polls, but it was populist anger at his personal behaviour (and related self-inflicted wounds like responding to his MP being censured by the committee that investigates Parliamentary standards by throwing out the committee) that saw him and his government nosedive in the polls in the days that immediately followed the revelations and his reaction, not the difficulty of navigating COVID for the last couple of years.
a) the inevitable consequences of his utter, careless incompetence, fuelled by his psychopathic narcissism,
b) the impotent rage of uninformed populists who were misled by his purely selfish, transactional, expedient choices (including his documented, arbitrary position on Brexit) and who are doubling down on the nonsense he sold them rather than kicking him to the kerb,
c) and those of us in a broad left/right consensus who recognise a) and b), and who have been trying to tell those who do not for literally decades that this man belongs nowhere near power because he believes in nothing but himself and will lie to anyone to get power for himself.
In other words: the pressure on Boris is all about the failings of Boris.
One of the big questions I think people should begin to ask is: what if there is no successor to Boris in the sense of those who came before? What if whoever comes after him arrives in a system that bears little resemblance to the system in which, for example, Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair operated? What if the many outcomes of his inverse Midas Touch are so severe that Britain as a political entity ceases to exist and England becomes a corrupt, undemocratic state with a Prime Minister who comfortably operates independently of parliamentary scrutiny by default?
Our system is failing very quickly, and the only people who can remove Boris Johnson from power are experiencing the exact same frog-boiling of their ethical codes that happened to the GOP.
How many chances has he had? And does anyone telling us earnestly that he is on his last chance really believe it?
From my left-leaning view, the middle is exactly the problem. E.g. "the third way" that the Democrats, Labour and SPD in Germany were following. Or Blair going into Iraq based on lies. The financial crisis. To me, all these are a result of the middle. The leftist parties didn't do what they were supposed to do - oppose wars, regulate economy to ensure stability and fairness.
To me, the middle means that whatever we vote for, whoever is in charge, nothing really changes. Every time left parties manage to win an election, they start to compromise and don't actually do the things they promised.
If the left is unhappy that everything is to right, and the right is unhappy that everything is to left and the middle thinks it doesn't even exist, then I don't know what the hell is broken.
Modern governments just seem to fail at being a positive factor in peoples live. It's all crumbling, it's all cost overrun, it's all compromise that is worse than both competing ideas. I often feel like all the tings that were done during my parents time are just deemed impossible now. Like NASA used to be able to put people on the Moon, and now they don't even have a manned platform anymore.
It's unambiguously, purely a populist position, wilfully divorced from data and focussing on sovereignty and self-determination and Britishness. It never made a technocratic case for itself at all, and in general the core Brexiteers excelled in avoiding making a technocratic case -- it was always going to be hard Brexit because every technocratic argument was successfully shot down as appeasement.
Every single major sales pitch for Brexit was populist in nature; no convincing sales pitch for good governance, economic success or long term growth was ever made. It's always about being free of Them, which is an essentially populist position.
I was unemployed for 9 months (which drained me of my savings), couldn't visit my grandmother because of the instability created by the repeated lock-downs and uncertainty. It almost financially ruined me. I can't afford to fix my car, I had to get into more debt to just get my hot water running. At the same time politicians, media personalities and the like went out boozing, sleeping with their mistresses and doing exactly what they like. Everyone of them should be thrown in jail for what they have done.
There shouldn't be any trust put in the political process. I hope it won't be restored ever. People shouldn't trust any politician at all nor the democratic process. Time after time these people have failed the people (all the political parties) spectacularly. The system itself selects for the very people that you don't want.
> Maybe it’s just my politics, but it seems to me that whatever your politics, the lack of a functioning middle leaves us all worse off.
The "functioning" middle is what has led us to this place. There is a famous quote from Noam Chomsky which is apt:
> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
The idea functioning middle is sold to people because most people believe in being reasonable and fair minded. This unfortunately is misleading. What it really means is "business as usual". Business as usual brought up the Iraq war, endless wars in the middle east, financial crisis after financial crisis where everyday people get shafted.
I don't want to be represented by any of them. You also don't really get to choose who you get represented by anyway. You get a very small say in who represents you. If I wanted someone to represent me, I would hire someone myself.
[0] He's been a Labour backbencher since 1983, and his policies didn't change much over the intervening years.
The magazine is now owned by Jacobin, IIRC, and has a more left-wing editorial line than the MPs group.