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The Great Regression that we are witnessing currently may be the product of a collaboration between the risks of globalization and neoliberalism. The problems that have arisen from the failure of politicians to exercise some control over global interdependence are impinging on societies that are institutionally and culturally unprepared for them.
[...] As long as jobs, pensions and incomes continue to shrink, minorities and migrants will continue to be obvious scapegoats until a persuasive political message emerges from left liberal voices about restructuring income, social welfare and public resources. [...]
Germany [...] can also exit, close its borders, hoard its wealth and let the rest of Europe (and the world) solve its own problems. The latter may be the message from the German right, but it would be a foolish option. Global interdependence is here to stay and German wealth is as dependent on the global economy as anyone else's. The 'exit' solution would not be good for Germany. [...]
[...] populism is tied to a plebiscitary linkage which does not empower the people as a whole, but rather an individual leader. This plebiscitarian turn can be seen in regressive politics, with leaders appealing to the masses through anti-establishment discourses while manipulating rather than involving 'the people'.
contrasting plebiscitary with participatory
[...] Trump's victory is not solely a revolt against global finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but progressive neoliberalism [...] an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism and LGBTQ rights) on the one side, and high-end 'symbolic' and service-based sectors of business (Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood) on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and the middle-class livelihoods that were once available to those engaged in it.
[...] feminism and Wall Street are birds of a feather, perfectly united in the person of Hillary Clinton.
What made possible that conflation was the absence of any genuine left [...] any comprehensive left narrative that articulated the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization, on the one hand, and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation, on the other. [...]
[...] Does anyone believe that a Clinton presidency would have gone after Wall Street and the 1 per cent? That it would have diminished rather than stoked populist rage? In fact, the rage felt by many Trump supporters is quite legitimate, even if much of it is currently mal-directed towards immigration and other scapegoats. The proper response is not moral condemnation but political validation, while redirecting the rage to the systemic predations of finance capital.
yesss
[...] Trump's victory marked a defeat for the holy alliance of emancipation with financialization. But his presidency offers no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new 'new left'.
Nancy Baeser
[...] Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations. The promised service economy and knowledge-based society turned out to be smaller than the industrial society that was fast disappearing; hence a constant expansion of the numbers of people who were no longer needed, the surplus population of a revived capitalism on the move, watching helplessly and uncomprehendingly the transformation of the tax state into the debt state and finally into the consolidation state [...]
[...] the surviving Blair supporters in the Labour Party believed they could persuade their traditional voters to remain in the EU with a lengthy catalogue of the economic benefits of membership, without taking the uneven distribution of those benefits into account.It did not occur to a liberal public cut off from the everyday experience of the groups and regions in decline that the electorate might have wanted the government they had installed o show greater interest in their concerns than in international agreements. [...]
I love the connotations of "surviving Blair supporters"