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I was born in 1954, and until now I would have said that the late 1960s was the greatest period of political convulsion I have lived through. Yet for all that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle changed American culture and reshaped political parties, in retrospect those wild storms look like the normal oscillations of a relatively stable political system. The present moment is different. Today’s citizen revolt — in the United States, Britain, and Europe — may upend politics as nothing else has in my lifetime.

In the late 1960s, elites were in disarray, as they are now — but back then they were fleeing from kids rebelling against their parents’ world; now the elites are fleeing from the parents. Extremism has gone mainstream. One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. British Prime Minister David Cameron thought that voters would defer to the near-universal opinion of experts; that only shows how utterly he misjudged his own people.

Both the Conservative and the Labour parties in Britain are now in crisis. The British have had their day of reckoning; the American one looms. If Donald Trump loses, and loses badly (forgive me my reckless optimism, but I believe he will) the Republican Party may endure a historic split between its know-nothing base and its K Street/Chamber of Commerce leadership class. The Socialist government of France may face a similar fiasco in national elections next spring: Polls indicate that President François Hollande would not even make it to the final round of voting. Right-wing parties all over Europe are clamoring for an exit vote of their own.

Yes, it’s possible that all the political pieces will fly up into the air and settle down more or less where they were before, but the Brexit vote shows that shocking change isn’t very shocking anymore. Where, then, could those pieces end up? Europe is already pointing in one direction. In much of Europe, far-right nativist parties lead in the polls. So far, none has mustered a majority, though last month Norbert Hofer, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, which traffics in Nazi symbolism, came within a hair of winning election as president. Mainstream parties of the left and right may increasingly combine forces to keep out the nationalists. This has already happened in Sweden, where a right-of-center party serves as the minority partner to the left-of-center government. If the Socialists in France do in fact lose the first round, they will almost certainly support the conservative Republicans against the far-right National Front.

Perhaps these informal coalitions can survive until the fever breaks. But the imperative of cohabitation could also lead to genuine realignment. That is, chunks of parties from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only alternative to irrelevance.

The issue, at bottom, is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces and thus the demand that someone, somehow, restore the status quo ante. It may seem strange that the reaction has come today rather than immediately after the economic crisis of 2008, but the ebbing of the crisis has led to a new sense of stagnation. With prospects of flat growth in Europe and minimal income growth in the United States, voters are rebelling against their dismal long-term prospects. And globalization means culture as well as economics: Older people whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and multicultural celebrations are waving their fists at cosmopolitan elites. I was recently in Poland, where a far-right party appealing to nationalism and tradition has gained power despite years of undeniable prosperity under a centrist regime. Supporters use the same words again and again to explain their vote: “values and tradition.” They voted for Polishness against the modernity of Western Europe.

Perhaps politics will realign itself around the axis of globalization, with the fist-shakers on one side and the pragmatists on the other. The nationalists would win the loyalty of working-class and middle-class whites who see themselves as the defenders of sovereignty. The reformed center would include the beneficiaries of globalization and the poor and non-white and marginal citizens who recognize that the celebration of national identity excludes them.

Of course, mainstream parties of both the left and the right are trying to reach the angry nationalists. Sometimes this takes the form of gross truckling, as when Nicolas Sarkozy, who is seeking to regain France’s presidency, denounces the “tyranny of minorities” and invokes the “forever France” of an all-white past. From the left, Hillary Clinton has jettisoned her free-trade past to appeal to union members and others who want to protect national borders against the global market. But left and right disagree so deeply about how best to cushion the effects of globalization, and how to deal with the vast influx of refugees and migrants, that even the threat of extremism may not be enough to bring them to make common cause.

The schism we see opening before us is not just about policies, but about reality. The Brexit forces won because cynical leaders were prepared to cater to voters’ paranoia, lying to them about the dangers of immigration and the costs of membership in the EU. Some of those leaders have already begun to admit that they were lying. Donald Trump has, of course, set a new standard for disingenuousness and catering to voters’ fears, whether over immigration or foreign trade or anything else he can think of. The Republican Party, already rife with science-deniers and economic reality-deniers, has thrown itself into the embrace of a man who fabricates realities that ignorant people like to inhabit.

Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them.

Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it.

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Originally posted by G:
I notice you dropped your Trump signature - et tu Siggy?

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Hey SIG, you forgot to source where you got the title of this thread and who's work you cut and pasted here.- THUGR

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:


I would have thought .... since they are talking about you and me in such derogatory terms .... you would have had more to say than about my citations and signature. Doods, this is what the elite's intellectual butlers think of you and me.

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Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."

Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

It's a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists. It's a piece that praises Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall (it was good for the Irish!), the smoke-filled room (good for "brokering complex compromises"), and pork (it helps "glue Congress together" by giving members "a kind of currency to trade").

Rauch even chokes multiple times on the word "corruption," seeming reluctant to even mention the concept without shrouding it in flurries of caveats. When he talks about the "ever-present potential for corruption" that political middlemen pose, he's quick to note the converse also applies (emphasis mine):
"Overreacting to the threat of corruption… is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents."

The basic thrust is that shadowy back-room mechanisms, which Rauch absurdly describes as being relics of a lost era, have a positive role and must be brought back. He argues back-room relationships and payoffs at least committed the actors involved to action. Meanwhile, all the transparency and sunshine and access the public is always begging for leads mainly to gridlock and frustration.


... Rauch compares "outsiders" and "amateurs" to viruses that get into the body, and describes the institutions that failed to prevent the likes of Trump from being nominated as being like the national immune system. Revolt against party insiders is therefore comparable to "abusing and attacking your own immune system."

This lurid metaphor is going to be compelling to a lot of people when Donald Trump is still moving in the direction of the nuclear football. But these "too much democracy" critics all leave out a key part of the story: It's all bull.

Voters in America not only aren't over-empowered, they've for decades now been almost totally disenfranchised, subjects of one of the more brilliant change-suppressing systems ever invented.

We have periodic elections, which leave citizens with the feeling of self-rule. But in reality people are only allowed to choose between candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billion dollars and the approval of a half-dozen giant media companies has any chance at high office.

People have no other source of influence. Unions have been crushed. Nobody has any job security. Main Street institutions that once allowed people to walk down the road to sort things out with other human beings have been phased out. In their place now rest distant, unfeeling global bureaucracies.

Has a health insurance company wrongly denied your sick child coverage? Good luck even getting someone on the phone to talk it over, much less get it sorted out. Your neighborhood bank, once a relatively autonomous mechanism for stimulating the local economy, is now a glorified ATM machine with limited ability to respond to a community's most basic financial concerns.

One of the underpublicized revelations of the financial crisis, for instance, was that millions of Americans found themselves unable to get answers to a simple questions like, "Who holds the note to my house?"

People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don't want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don't seem to care what they're going through, and think they know what's best for everyone.

These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who'd exposed a tiny flaw in the system.

People are still free to vote, and some peculiarities in the structure of the commercial media, combined with mountains of public anger, conspired to put one of the two parties in the hands of a coverage-devouring billionaire running on a "Purge the Scum" platform.

But choosing a dangerous race-baiting lunatic as the vehicle for the first successful revolt in ages against one of the two major parties will have many profound negative consequences for voters. The most serious will surely be this burgeoning movement to describe voting and democracy as inherently dangerous.

Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society is "We are the white cells, voters are the disease" is comparably scary in its own banal, less click-generating way.

These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.

Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.

Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this election season couldn't get any worse.

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On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global illiberalism. The movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen like Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher education in favor of railing against common enemies like outsiders and globalization.

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And you’ll find few Trump supporters among the largely left-wing American professoriate.

Yet intellectuals are accountable for the rise of these movements—albeit indirectly. Professors have offered stringent criticisms of neoliberal society. But they have failed to offer the public viable alternatives.

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In this way, they have promoted a political nihilism that has set the stage for new movements that reject liberal democratic principles of tolerance and institutional reform.

Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a “philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets.” Beginning in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet, left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus “that modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made them indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred.”

For most of the 20th century, anti-liberal intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended the Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French, American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.

The collapse of Communism changed all this. Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas in the Third World, like Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure critique.

Academics are now mostly gadflies who rarely offer strategies for political change. Those who do forward alternatives propose ones so vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing nothing. (The Duke University professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of modern globalization are so pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.)

Such thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change as cosmetic, while patronizing those who think otherwise.

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This nihilism easily spreads from the classroom and academic journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and eventually to the public at large.

For academic nihilists, the shorthand for the world’s evils is “neoliberalism.” The term is used to refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for all global drudgery.

Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, is “something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required.” They argue that our belief that we can use laws and constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of “fetishism” that is ultimately “chimerical.”

For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, the democratic pursuit of happiness amid neoliberalism is nothing but “cruel optimism.” The materialist things that people desire are “actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” she writes.

According to this logic, we are trapped by our own ideologies. It is this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to implicitly side with British nativists in their condemnation of the EU. The radical website Counterpunch, for example, describes the EU as a “neoliberal prison.” It also views liberals seeking to reform the EU as “coopted by the right wing and its goals—from the subversion of progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine.”

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Across the Atlantic, Trump supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a black, gay, college-educated Trump supporter, Samantha Bee was told: “We’ve had these disasters in neoconservatism and neoliberalism and I think that he [Trump] is an alternative to both those paths.”

The academic nihilists and the Trumpists are in agreement about a key issue: The system is fundamentally broken, and liberals who believe in working patiently toward change are weak.

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For the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “indifference” is the “the hallmark of political liberalism.” Since liberals balance different interests and rights, Santos writes, they have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to “revive the friend/foe dichotomy.” And in a profane way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against Muslims, Britain against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals.

Unfortunately, academic anti-liberalism is not confined to the West. The Cornell political scientist Benedict Anderson once described liberal democracy in the Philippines as a “Cacique Democracy,” dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families. In this system, meaningful reform is difficult, since the country’s political system is like a “well-run casino,” where tables are rigged in favor of oligarch bosses. Having a nihilist streak myself, I once echoed Anderson when I chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting “hope onto spaces within an elite democracy.” Like Anderson, I offered no alternative.

The alternative arrived recently in the guise of the Duterte, the new president of the Philippines. Like Anderson and me, Duterte complained about the impossibility of real change in a democracy dominated by elites and oligarchs. But unlike us, he proposed a way out: a strong political leader who was willing to kill to save the country from criminals and corrupt politicians.

The spread of global illiberalism is unlikely to end soon. As this crisis unfolds, we will need intellectuals who use their intellects for more than simple negation—professors like the late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that European-style social democracy could save global democracy. Failing that, we need academics who acknowledge that liberal democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum of tolerance in a world beset by xenophobia and hatred. For although academics have the luxury of imagining a completely different world, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the one we have.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Oh my god, where to begin???

The reality is that people are flailing about because their prospects are getting meaner, smaller, and less empowered - not because intellectuals are yammering at them from the sidelines.

www.alternet.org/story/141260/taking_shorter_showers_doesn't_cut_i
t%3A_why_personal_change_does_not_equal_political_change

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You are also right about people thinking too small, the small kind of thinking that they can fix their lives by recycling and vegetarianism and high efficiency light bulbs.- SECOND

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How did the world get into this mess? It is easy to describe what is wrong in four paragraphs. Easy to imagine a fix, too, but difficult to imagine millions of citizens actually stop “flailing about”.
They desire a Superman (Trump perhaps?) to fly in and fix their government for them. They don’t want to expend any effort greater than voting for Superman once every 4 years. And while he is at it, could Superman please build them a new car, a new house, and pay them a salary in gold Superman discovered in the asteroid belt?

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I’ll use the USA as my example for what is wrong.

1) Voters have no incentive to be informed or to process information in a rational way, so they vote their “feelings”. Feelings are so much quicker than reasons. An individual vote makes a difference only when it changes the outcome of an election, that is, only if it breaks a tie. The chances that an individual voter will break a tie in a major national election, such as the US presidential election or the Brexit vote, are about the same as her chances of winning Powerball or EuroMillions. No one has a stake in her own individual vote. No voter, old or young, has an incentive to use her vote wisely.

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2) Everybody wants to pay less taxes. Politicians play upon that feeling. When the time comes to actually lower the taxes, the rich who are paying attention to the details are always pushing for a change to their advantage. The poor who don’t pay attention to the details are always completely obvious to changes in the tax code. You think the poor would band together against the rich? Doesn’t happen. So what to do? The poor pick a rich person to champion their cause. Sometimes they pick an FDR who will magnanimously help the poor. Sometimes they pick a Trump, who won’t even publicize any of his income tax returns for any year, no matter how far in the past.

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3) Along with voting and nonvoting citizens’ burning desire to pay less taxes comes another desire: feeling the need to balance the budget. It is not odd that the balance is always shifting in favor of the people who pay attention to where the budget is spent. Those who don’t pay attention get less spent on programs they feel they deserve. Then they run to the rich, a Trump or a Bush, to rebalance in their favor. I’m not surprised when government spending decisions are unbalanced. George Bush’s tax plan was terrible, before he was elected. Trump’s will be terrible. www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-tax-plan Do the poor even understand what Trump has planned? No. There are no poor people reading taxes plans. There are many rich people who do read the plans and do understand.

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4) The USA is always at war because most US citizens won’t ever be wounded or killed in those wars. They won’t even be asked to fight in a war. Today there are very few US citizens who publicly protest war, unlike back during in the Vietnam War, because there are no burdens on them from wars, except for taxes. The extra tax burden is easily finessed. Citizens feel “defense” spending is good for their safety and the economy. Citizens never need proof validating their “feelings”. They “know” war makes them safe. There is an article about how the USA went from being extremely reluctant to declare war to eternally belligerent: www.dissentmagazine.org/article/war-without-politics-draft-drones-aumf

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
Hey SIG, you forgot to source where you got the title of this thread and who's work you cut and pasted here.


You Have Angered Your Ethical & Intellectual Superiors....

Discussion in 'The Pavilion' started by il ragno, Yesterday at 10:44 AM.

il ragno

When you have to shoot, shoot! - don't talk.

Member Since:May 28, 2010 Message Count:4,468 Reputation: 81,951,678 Ratings Received:+7,038 / 29 / -84

.....and now you must pay. No - no pleading!.....it's far too late for that, you crucifix-clutching human garbage.

It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses
The Brexit has laid bare the political schism of our time. It’s not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry.

BY JAMES TRAUB
JUNE 28, 2016

http://thebeerbarrel.net/threads/you-have-angered-your-ethical-intelle
ctual-superiors.36391/


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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
The warmongering oligarch I'm confident will be a global problem, maybe even a global radioactive one.

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Putin?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The USA is always at war because TPTB want it that way. Americans have to be stampeded with endless scare stories about nonexistent WMD or fake massacres before they become engaged, and EVEN THEN there are people who object. There was in fact a fairly robust anti-war movement, and demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq. But like the Occupy movement, TPTB simply don't pay attention to demonstrations anymore, they just roll over them and go on with their plans.

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The USA is always at war because TPTB want it that way. Americans have to be stampeded with endless scare stories about nonexistent WMD or fake massacres before they become engaged, and EVEN THEN there are people who object. There was in fact a fairly robust anti-war movement, and demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq. But like the Occupy movement, TPTB simply don't pay attention to demonstrations anymore, they just roll over them and go on with their plans. -SIGNY

A million people demonstrating against war will change nothing. It is not the fault of TPTB that the deep desires of a million anti-war protesters are ignored. It is the fault of the tens of millions that voted for this particular TPTB - SECOND

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The Powers that Be (TPTB) wouldn’t be in power if The People would stop using their feelings to decide who should be in power.

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For example, the villainous Nixon and Bush were elected a second time.

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I ask who gave these bad men power again and again? Their first term was plenty of warning about what these Presidents would do during their next term. But before they were even elected the first time these men had a history that should have warned anybody. These two guys, temporarily at the head of TPTB, produced catastrophes that could have been easily avoided. Now we have two more sadly inadequate Presidential candidates chosen during the Primaries by The People.

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The California Democratic primary has come and gone, but the mail-in ballots are still being counted. Hillary Clinton was announced the winner over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but with each new vote tally, her lead diminishes. As of July 2, Clinton’s lead in California has shrunk from 12 percent to just 7.6 percent. In a previous story in The Inquisitr, Bernie had already flipped three counties by June 12.

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When the future once more goes sadly wrong, The People will be at fault for raising Hillary or Trump to be the next figurehead/leader of TPTB. But The People really don’t want to think about the Big Choices, do they? Most People didn’t vote in the Primaries because they were too wrapped up in their little tiny lives to think about Big Important Decisions that will change their little tiny lives forever.

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