Cause #6 is given far too short a shrift. FF acknowledges that cultural factors played an important role in the Nixon and Reagan ascendencies. That should a clue to be paid attention to, as opposed to written off as not explaining the current more intense cultural counter-reaction.
The Left in the West has pushed much farther to disavow and delegitimize national identity and sovereignty in the past 10 years than in any previous era. Immigration in the US and Europe especially from non-Western countries has reached levels maybe an order of magnitude higher. It’s hard to imagine the British grooming gangs scandal occurring in the 80’s. We get treated every day on X to 15 year old Trump-lite statements about immigration from the Clintons, Schumer and Biden. We hear historically very extremist positions on transgender surgery for children and men playing in women’s sports.
The rise of populism is only in very direct proportion to the level of extremism embedded in our current culture. Progressive control over culture hijacked long standing and accepted national and personal norms in service of its social justice urge, an urge which is profoundly antithetical to long accepted ideals of family nation and God.
Eventually ordinary common sense people (ie populists) say ENOUGH! I am proud of my country, I believe in God and value traditional family centric ideals. And Im tired of being scolded by a bunch of wingnuts.
This explanation is useful because the dynamic and feelings I have described are universal around Western countries.
I'm not onboard with this thesis. I think the Internet is the amplification mechanism for the other causes, but it is not the cause. The "term "populism" in this context is a class invective that points to one of the key causes. What is popular in a democracy is what the people believe, not what the over-educated credentialled class elites believe. The premise of this piece is a bit irritating in that is more of that top-down scold that the people don't know how good they have it... if only Fox News and Trump would stop lying to them, they should be happy!
"Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them."
This is another swing and miss. There are two camps of supply-side Republicans here. One supports free trade and capitalism. The other demands globalism, corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. This latter is fully backed by the current Democrat regime when they are not pushing absurd radical postmodernist feminist ideology. The former is old-school capitalism... the Adam Smith version that assumes domestic labor would share in the returns of domestic capital invested.
There is absolutely no version of real capitalism that supports exporting all of our industry and manufacturing jobs to other countries for the last penny of corporate profit. Global trade is designed for unique product and services, or for significant and unsolvable capacity imbalances... not "here China, you do all these jobs because your poor peasants will do them cheaper."
Just take a look at Shenzhen in the 1980s and now and consider what the US gave away.
NAFTA and then allowing communist China into the WTO were good moves for the upper 10% and sucked for the bottom 80%.
The top 10% own 80% of all stocks. The bottom 80% own 8% of all stocks. The top 10% own 70% of all the wealth.
Charles Murray covered all of this in his book "Coming Apart". There are several sub-causes, but the general root cause is the pursuit of globalism. Or another way to explain it is the failure of our Professional Managerial Class that runs the world to halt the US-funded post Bretton Woods Global Order after it achieved its goals and then began to cause more harm than good... and clearly is the root cause of the "coming apart".
Then we have massive immigration and educated females entering the workforce. Few jobs and more competition for the remaining supply. Good for the corporatists to have the cheap foreign labor and to force two-income families. Add to this inflation that has led to the US having the 6th highest cost of living. Corporate consolidation largely driven by globalism (large corporations can offshore, while small business has to rely on domestic labor) and with more big corporate consolidation the collusion with big government to layer on competition-killing regulations... this is the primary cause of high inflation. The supporters of globalism claim that it benefits us all with competition, but the truth is that it kills competition and turns the global economy into a global corporatocracy, where for example, one Brazilian muti-national owns 80% of the US beef market and beef prices have skyrocketed.
The US is almost $40 trillion in debt. Its infrastructure is crumbling. We have declining life expectancy. We run a $1.4 trillion dollar trade deficit. Family consumer debt is through the roof. We have millions of homeless. All other countries have tariffs on US goods, but the US has kept its platinum consumer markets open to them.
The support of Trump is simply a rejection of globalism and support for the US to implement a National Industrial Policy. The top10% don't want that to happen, and that is why they have gone to the Internet to implement cancel culture and now assassination culture.
Oh, and the population had the fog lifted from their eyes during the pandemic for what life would be like under Democrat rule.
In many ways we are in a similar spot to Renaissance Europe, after the development of the printing press and before the adoption of widespread censorship. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door it was dismissed as an “argument between monks” by Charles V, but within 3 years his message had circulated to millions of people, and the first state-led attempts to regulate media began.
The ultimate Renaissance conspiracy theory was probably the book Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of the Witches by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer managed to overturn an elite consensus forbidding the execution of witches that had lasted for a thousand years, arguing that Canon Law forbidding executions didn’t apply to “modern” witches who were responsible for anomalous weather patterns and crop failures. This coincided with the Little Ice Age. The book was a bestseller second only to the Bible for centuries, causing at least 60,000 deaths, 80% of them women.
Welcome aboard, Francis, I've been rowing this boat for nearly 10 years. My viewpoint is shared with James Madison, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." While the other eight issues are troubling, their presentation by the disinformation industry amplifies and distorts the problems, thus becoming more divisive. Although more limited in geographic scope and more difficult economic issues, the corollary to the America today is Germany in 1930. Goebbels weaponized the country's unlimited free speech and turned a giant swath of voters into believing that the Jews were the cause of all their problems and only Hitler had the right stuff to "fix" it. 60 million deaths later and a country in ruin, the German voters had to take hard look at their media environment and introduced hate speech laws with teeth. The only reason that more populists didn't pop up around the world then, as is the case today, is that the means of worldwide disinformation didn't exist. Our cherished First Amendment is eating America from the inside like a cancer. Beware First Amendment purists; unlimited free speech can be abused and weaponized. The solutions are available to us if only smart people with good intentions could address the obvious problem.
The specific way this happens is because of the simultaneous annhilation of local Politics and its media ecosystem: when all politics is national, a single person can easily swallow a party.
The First Past the Post system makes sense when local Politics is the relevant representation cleavage. But today, persons are very different, but places are more homogeneous. Proportional parlaments allow for ideological pluralism…
Cause #6 is given far too short a shrift. FF acknowledges that cultural factors played an important role in the Nixon and Reagan ascendencies. That should a clue to be paid attention to, as opposed to written off as not explaining the current more intense cultural counter-reaction.
The Left in the West has pushed much farther to disavow and delegitimize national identity and sovereignty in the past 10 years than in any previous era. Immigration in the US and Europe especially from non-Western countries has reached levels maybe an order of magnitude higher. It’s hard to imagine the British grooming gangs scandal occurring in the 80’s. We get treated every day on X to 15 year old Trump-lite statements about immigration from the Clintons, Schumer and Biden. We hear historically very extremist positions on transgender surgery for children and men playing in women’s sports.
The rise of populism is only in very direct proportion to the level of extremism embedded in our current culture. Progressive control over culture hijacked long standing and accepted national and personal norms in service of its social justice urge, an urge which is profoundly antithetical to long accepted ideals of family nation and God.
Eventually ordinary common sense people (ie populists) say ENOUGH! I am proud of my country, I believe in God and value traditional family centric ideals. And Im tired of being scolded by a bunch of wingnuts.
This explanation is useful because the dynamic and feelings I have described are universal around Western countries.
I think the most significant purity spirals that resulted in the worst of the cultural factors were primarily driven by the internet and social media.
I'm not onboard with this thesis. I think the Internet is the amplification mechanism for the other causes, but it is not the cause. The "term "populism" in this context is a class invective that points to one of the key causes. What is popular in a democracy is what the people believe, not what the over-educated credentialled class elites believe. The premise of this piece is a bit irritating in that is more of that top-down scold that the people don't know how good they have it... if only Fox News and Trump would stop lying to them, they should be happy!
"Becoming a Trump loyalist required many Republicans to abandon long-held beliefs about things like free trade and internationalism that once defined them."
This is another swing and miss. There are two camps of supply-side Republicans here. One supports free trade and capitalism. The other demands globalism, corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. This latter is fully backed by the current Democrat regime when they are not pushing absurd radical postmodernist feminist ideology. The former is old-school capitalism... the Adam Smith version that assumes domestic labor would share in the returns of domestic capital invested.
There is absolutely no version of real capitalism that supports exporting all of our industry and manufacturing jobs to other countries for the last penny of corporate profit. Global trade is designed for unique product and services, or for significant and unsolvable capacity imbalances... not "here China, you do all these jobs because your poor peasants will do them cheaper."
Just take a look at Shenzhen in the 1980s and now and consider what the US gave away.
NAFTA and then allowing communist China into the WTO were good moves for the upper 10% and sucked for the bottom 80%.
The top 10% own 80% of all stocks. The bottom 80% own 8% of all stocks. The top 10% own 70% of all the wealth.
Charles Murray covered all of this in his book "Coming Apart". There are several sub-causes, but the general root cause is the pursuit of globalism. Or another way to explain it is the failure of our Professional Managerial Class that runs the world to halt the US-funded post Bretton Woods Global Order after it achieved its goals and then began to cause more harm than good... and clearly is the root cause of the "coming apart".
Then we have massive immigration and educated females entering the workforce. Few jobs and more competition for the remaining supply. Good for the corporatists to have the cheap foreign labor and to force two-income families. Add to this inflation that has led to the US having the 6th highest cost of living. Corporate consolidation largely driven by globalism (large corporations can offshore, while small business has to rely on domestic labor) and with more big corporate consolidation the collusion with big government to layer on competition-killing regulations... this is the primary cause of high inflation. The supporters of globalism claim that it benefits us all with competition, but the truth is that it kills competition and turns the global economy into a global corporatocracy, where for example, one Brazilian muti-national owns 80% of the US beef market and beef prices have skyrocketed.
The US is almost $40 trillion in debt. Its infrastructure is crumbling. We have declining life expectancy. We run a $1.4 trillion dollar trade deficit. Family consumer debt is through the roof. We have millions of homeless. All other countries have tariffs on US goods, but the US has kept its platinum consumer markets open to them.
The support of Trump is simply a rejection of globalism and support for the US to implement a National Industrial Policy. The top10% don't want that to happen, and that is why they have gone to the Internet to implement cancel culture and now assassination culture.
Oh, and the population had the fog lifted from their eyes during the pandemic for what life would be like under Democrat rule.
In many ways we are in a similar spot to Renaissance Europe, after the development of the printing press and before the adoption of widespread censorship. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door it was dismissed as an “argument between monks” by Charles V, but within 3 years his message had circulated to millions of people, and the first state-led attempts to regulate media began.
The ultimate Renaissance conspiracy theory was probably the book Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of the Witches by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer managed to overturn an elite consensus forbidding the execution of witches that had lasted for a thousand years, arguing that Canon Law forbidding executions didn’t apply to “modern” witches who were responsible for anomalous weather patterns and crop failures. This coincided with the Little Ice Age. The book was a bestseller second only to the Bible for centuries, causing at least 60,000 deaths, 80% of them women.
Welcome aboard, Francis, I've been rowing this boat for nearly 10 years. My viewpoint is shared with James Madison, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate." While the other eight issues are troubling, their presentation by the disinformation industry amplifies and distorts the problems, thus becoming more divisive. Although more limited in geographic scope and more difficult economic issues, the corollary to the America today is Germany in 1930. Goebbels weaponized the country's unlimited free speech and turned a giant swath of voters into believing that the Jews were the cause of all their problems and only Hitler had the right stuff to "fix" it. 60 million deaths later and a country in ruin, the German voters had to take hard look at their media environment and introduced hate speech laws with teeth. The only reason that more populists didn't pop up around the world then, as is the case today, is that the means of worldwide disinformation didn't exist. Our cherished First Amendment is eating America from the inside like a cancer. Beware First Amendment purists; unlimited free speech can be abused and weaponized. The solutions are available to us if only smart people with good intentions could address the obvious problem.
The specific way this happens is because of the simultaneous annhilation of local Politics and its media ecosystem: when all politics is national, a single person can easily swallow a party.
The First Past the Post system makes sense when local Politics is the relevant representation cleavage. But today, persons are very different, but places are more homogeneous. Proportional parlaments allow for ideological pluralism…