Title : WORLDWIDE RIGHTWARD SHIFT: SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
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WORLDWIDE RIGHTWARD SHIFT: SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
What Angela Merkel
Could Tell
Republicans About
The Midterms
By: Charles Lane
Washington Post
04 January 2018
Solving this puzzle — radical discontent amid economic stability — is Job One not only for Merkel but also for politicians across the developed world.
Merkel’s speech offered jobs and job training, subsidies for family caregivers and greater equality. She invoked “the key principle of the social market economy — that economic success and social cohesion are two sides of the same coin,” as if that principle had not just been called into question by recent events.
NOTE: Lane's piece is not the first time that the reasons why Trump was elected and right wing parties in Europe have gained traction have been debated. There is something to the thesis that it's just not jobs, not just immigrants and not just fear of "the economy stupid." Here in America the economy is, if not booming, then chugging along quite merrily. Same in Europe. Unemployment in both areas is at near record lows. But Europeans - Germans in particular - don't have to worry about their health care. Unions are strong in Europe than here. Europeans aren't saddles with life changing debt just to get a bachelor's degree. European workers are much more secure than their American counterparts.
So what then accounts for similar shifts to the right in America and in Europe where conditions are fundamentally quite different? It's an excellent question and one that I do not have a ready answer for. But there is something at work, some force or forces, that have infected both Europe and America that have caused folks to turn rightward towards more authoritarian rulers. I'm thinking that it's the cultural side of the equation rather than the economic one that is the driver. As Lane points out Trump voters were actually richer than your average working class voter. We seem to have entered an era where everything has been upended by computers, the internet and social media. The worldwide changes in communications since the spread of the internet back in the 1980's have been especially profound. The introduction and spread of the cell phone - and its attendant networks - means that unlike any time in human history the remotest of villages are connected to the outside world. And remember, its the cell phone in the less developed nations that gives people access to the world wide web. The changes have been so swift and so profound that we have yet to catch up to assessing much less reacting and adjusting to their worldwide impacts.
It's sort of like the the late 1800's and early 1900's where new inventions - telephone, the elevator, the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, etc. - came online in such rapid succession that the reigning societal orders were upset and resulted world wide labor strife, the rise of socialism and Communism, to the point of World War I. We are, I believe, in the midst of a similar era with no end in sight. Whenever profound forces disrupt the existing social order, the common reaction is to want to restore order by cracking down, reaching back to a Golden Age for guidance and taking comfort in strong leaders. This is where we are. How - another World War? - or when - a decade, a century? - this shift ends is basically unknown.
As a 1970's Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, to make a phone call I had to go down to the PTT office, have an operator place the call for me, wait maybe 20 minutes to 2 hours to get a connection (overseas line) and then shout into the handset in order to be heard if the call wasn't dropped after two minutes. Those days are gone forever.
Have A Great Day!
Could Tell
Republicans About
The Midterms
By: Charles Lane
Washington Post
04 January 2018
German Chancellor Angela Merkel sounded a bit perplexed in her annual New Year’s address. Germany, she noted accurately, is strong and economically successful, and more of its people have jobs than ever before.
Yet the country is plagued by “anxieties and doubts.” Many feel confident, many others “left out.” There seems to be a “rift running through” her society, Merkel lamented.
The unspoken, but obvious, background was September’s German election, in which a new right-wing populist party captured 1 out of every 8 votes, entering Parliament in sufficient numbers to prevent Merkel from forming a majority, though she still rules as a caretaker.
The German right’s destabilizing rise, and the wider populist trend it illustrates, has undermined a lot of conventional political wisdom, especially the idea that political moderation flows from economic prosperity.
Germany’s economy is the strongest in Europe and was even spared the worst of the 2008-2009 global recession. Yet a significant portion of its people, many more, apparently, than the traditional party system could absorb, are angry just the same — about the influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, about crime and violence, or about what Merkel called the “pace of contemporary life.” Now many are angry over the rise of the right.
Solving this puzzle — radical discontent amid economic stability — is Job One not only for Merkel but also for politicians across the developed world.
That very much includes the Democrats and Republicans of President Trump’s America, who this fall face what could be the most consequential midterm elections of the postwar era.
Politicians know how to react to a crisis such as the Great Recession, when financial concerns are top of mind and politics can reduce to “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Yet in today’s near-fully healed economy, in which all major regions of the world appear to be growing simultaneously, there’s a mismatch between the underlying causes of populist reaction and the programs that politicians promise in response to it.
To be sure, rising populism is linked to the now-familiar narrative about disruption of previously stable industries by globalization and the accompanying loss of economic security for many modestly educated working-class people.
Yet this is not the same as saying that job or income losses led to Trumpism. Rather, a 2016 study of 125,000 American adults by Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that Trump voters had slightly higher incomes than others and were no more likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition from trade and immigration.
Studies in Europe by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart confirm that basic finding. Right-wing populism has much more to do with feelings of cultural and demographic displacement, and with being looked down upon by cosmopolitan elites, than material privation per se. This is especially true among older, rural whites.
Merkel’s speech offered jobs and job training, subsidies for family caregivers and greater equality. She invoked “the key principle of the social market economy — that economic success and social cohesion are two sides of the same coin,” as if that principle had not just been called into question by recent events.
Republicans in the United States seek to administer their usual economic medicine — tax cuts, which supposedly create jobs. Democrats, to the extent they have a program, offer a $15 minimum wage and health care. Both parties are maneuvering to buy votes with infrastructure spending.
More, or even more equitable, capitalist economic growth would not necessarily ease angst that may itself be traceable, ultimately, to the disruptive cultural and social impact of capitalist economic growth.
Karl Marx thought economics was the motor of history and that economic class conflict would define modern politics. Yet no one more eloquently described how capitalism breeds reaction as well as revolution:
“Everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,” he wrote. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned."
Donald Trump won the presidency by validating “the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” of his supporters and by promising to resist the profanation of what they considered holy.
In doing so, Trump shattered the long-standing but intellectually inconsistent Republican coalition between free-marketers and cultural conservatives. At the same time, he triggered a counter-reaction by a younger, more diverse coalition that embraces progressive cultural norms and increasingly considers the Democratic Party its political home. In 2018, these two rapidly changing political bodies collide again, with the future of American government at stake.
NOTE: Lane's piece is not the first time that the reasons why Trump was elected and right wing parties in Europe have gained traction have been debated. There is something to the thesis that it's just not jobs, not just immigrants and not just fear of "the economy stupid." Here in America the economy is, if not booming, then chugging along quite merrily. Same in Europe. Unemployment in both areas is at near record lows. But Europeans - Germans in particular - don't have to worry about their health care. Unions are strong in Europe than here. Europeans aren't saddles with life changing debt just to get a bachelor's degree. European workers are much more secure than their American counterparts.
So what then accounts for similar shifts to the right in America and in Europe where conditions are fundamentally quite different? It's an excellent question and one that I do not have a ready answer for. But there is something at work, some force or forces, that have infected both Europe and America that have caused folks to turn rightward towards more authoritarian rulers. I'm thinking that it's the cultural side of the equation rather than the economic one that is the driver. As Lane points out Trump voters were actually richer than your average working class voter. We seem to have entered an era where everything has been upended by computers, the internet and social media. The worldwide changes in communications since the spread of the internet back in the 1980's have been especially profound. The introduction and spread of the cell phone - and its attendant networks - means that unlike any time in human history the remotest of villages are connected to the outside world. And remember, its the cell phone in the less developed nations that gives people access to the world wide web. The changes have been so swift and so profound that we have yet to catch up to assessing much less reacting and adjusting to their worldwide impacts.
It's sort of like the the late 1800's and early 1900's where new inventions - telephone, the elevator, the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, etc. - came online in such rapid succession that the reigning societal orders were upset and resulted world wide labor strife, the rise of socialism and Communism, to the point of World War I. We are, I believe, in the midst of a similar era with no end in sight. Whenever profound forces disrupt the existing social order, the common reaction is to want to restore order by cracking down, reaching back to a Golden Age for guidance and taking comfort in strong leaders. This is where we are. How - another World War? - or when - a decade, a century? - this shift ends is basically unknown.
As a 1970's Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, to make a phone call I had to go down to the PTT office, have an operator place the call for me, wait maybe 20 minutes to 2 hours to get a connection (overseas line) and then shout into the handset in order to be heard if the call wasn't dropped after two minutes. Those days are gone forever.
Have A Great Day!
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