Dawn

Dawn

Monday, January 07, 2019

Thoughts from Hoylake, England: 7.1.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

Spain
  • This is a insightful look at the Spanish Right since the end of the Franco era and at the recent emergence of the 'Far Right' Vox party, which differs in some ways from similar parties that have come to prominence elsewhere in Europe in recent years. The author claims that the “absent presence” of the values of the Far Right masked the persistence of a neoconservative and xenophobic Francoism. This had, without doubt, hitherto lacked distinct political expression, instead being diluted within a “big-tent” Partido Popular (PP), Spain’s dominant conservative party. But now it is being given a new lease of life in Vox, a party with deep roots in the history of far-right organizing.
  • The author's concluding comments are that: The wider backdrop to Vox’s breakthrough is the austerity policies implemented within the context of a systemic crisis that we have been living through for more than a decade. These policies have shaken social cohesion, with a rise in unemployment, economic security, and social grievances. This situation is especially grave in Andalusia, Spain’s single most populous region, which has suffered the crisis more than the rest, with even lower average incomes, more unemployment, a higher risk of social exclusion, more energy poverty, and higher inequality. This polarization of incomes, which has emptied out the working and middle classes’ bank accounts, in turn polarizes all politics, a fact that has directly impacted upon the stability of the party system.
  • One major question, of course, is whether this would have happened – or would have been so bad – if Spain had still had its own currency and had been able to adopt the traditional measure of devaluing it when the easy/cheap money boom ended in 2007/8. In other words, how much did the introduction of the (politically inspired) euro contribute to this situation?
  • Another obvious question is whether – notwithstanding all the corruption and the huge exacerbation of income/wealth differences brought about by boom and bust – Spain will be stronger in the longer run. Without the talent that fled it to find jobs elsewhere when youth unemployment was over 50%. It's now down to something like a mere 35%, I believe. So any 'long-run' improvement is not yet in sight. Unless you're rich. In which case, you've already had it. Witness the number of new millionaires in Spain over the last decade. During which life has got better and better for those with (non-liquid) assets.

The World
  • The article just cited stresses 'polarisation' in Spain over the last 10 years or so. By chance, this morning I found on my laptop the article below, which I'd downloaded a while ago. It talks, inter alia, about the disappearance of the 'centre' from western politics.

The USA
  • The astonishing origins of the loony wall idea.
  • And an apt overview: This massive shift in policy - something no politician from either party has previously offered any serious advocacy of - was created to make up for the character flaws and intellectual shortcomings of the man who is now the president. And it’s now being used to justify shutting down the federal government, causing massive problems and a great deal of hardship for millions of people. That’s pretty frightening. But that’s where we are now.

© [David] Colin Davies

THE ARTICLE

The five new rules turning Western politics on its head: Allister Heath

The midterms confirmed that centrism is dead, tribalism is back and identity is everything. Politicians must now adapt to survive 
It used to be so easy. When the economy did well, the incumbent party won; when it did badly, it was the opposition’s turn, with voters switching their allegiance with the ups and down of the cycle. Fiscal attitudes were equally straightforward: richer, middle class and aspirational people voted for tax cuts, and those trapped in poverty or otherwise dependent on the state for spending increases.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” as the strategist James Carville put it in 1992, and in those days he was largely right. There were exceptions: the Falklands war helped Mrs Thatcher triumph in 1983, despite a tough economic transition, and in the US the rise of the religious Right in the 1980s began to reshape parties. Yet Carville’s dictum remained the closest thing to the golden rule of democratic politics.

Fast-forward 25 years, and the landscape has changed beyond recognition almost everywhere. The US economy is doing remarkably well and yet the Republicans lost the House of Representatives. True, the kicking that Donald Trump received was pretty normal for a mid-term election, and he won some senators. But there was a striking disconnect between the share of the public saying that the economy is doing well, and the large swing to the Democrats.

Crucially, the better-off and highly educated moved even more markedly to the Left, and the poor to the Right. Suburbs with lots of younger graduates embraced the Democrats, as did most non-white Americans, whereas blue-collar workers, the religious and rural dwellers voted Republican. The people most likely to benefit from Trump’s tax cuts often voted against them, whereas those who may have gained from the Democrats’ predilection for redistribution backed Trump.

What is going on? Here are what I believe to be the five most important rules governing the new politics, not just in America but also in Britain and across Europe.

First, the class-based, economically deterministic world of yore is being superseded by the rise of “identity politics” and the emergence of new, cultural and value cleavages. Ideology is back, but in a manner that cuts across the old Left and Right: millions vote in a certain way either because of their own personal characteristics, such as their gender, race, religion or occupation, or because they believe in particular non-economic values.

Such voters are increasingly influenced by their attitude to nation states and international technocracies, their opinions on immigration and ethnic change, their views on family structures and gender, and on whether they like the way the world is changing. Politics has become a form of self-positioning, a fashion statement rather than a means to an end, even an indicator of status akin to a luxury good, turbocharged by social media. It also feeds into a need for belonging in an inchoate universe: we want to vote for “people like us” and against “people like them”. Tribalism is back, as is class war; but the groups pitted against each other are now very different. Welcome to cultural warfare in a digital age.

In the UK, Brexit has become a significant dividing line, though both parties’ lack of clarity is blunting a full realignment. In the US, many rich bankers, most tech workers, mental-health workers and taxi drivers voted Democrat; most surgeons, dentists, fossil-fuel workers and lorry drivers voted Republican. Income no longer matters as much:it’s all about subcultures. The UK is fortunate that our own cultural wars haven’t centred on race: some minorities, including Hindus, now vote Tory; in the US, most non-white voters vote Democrat.

Second, campaigns are now more about firing up sympathetic groups and making sure that they vote, rather than trying to change minds. Dramatic shifts do take place: there is widespread support for gay marriage. But shifts in opinion more commonly follow changes of identity: for example, as people start to feel less “British” and more “English”, they become far more likely to vote Tory. In the US, married women with children vote Republican, while unmarried women with no children vote Democrat.

Third, parties are polarising in extreme ways, and the centre is vanishing. Nobody seems to care about wavering voters anymore.It’s not just Trump’s Republicans: the Democrats are embracing openly socialist policies for the first time in their history and support almost open borders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old elected in New York, symbolises this radicalisation: she is the US’s answer to Corbynism.

In Germany, the old order is imploding: the centre-Right CDU and the centre-Left SPD are in terminal crisis, replaced by the neo-communist Linke, the hard-Left Greens and the anti-immigration AFD. Emmanuel Macron isn’t a real centrist, and in any case his popularity is in freefall, with extremists on the rise. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is the most extreme Left-wing opposition in British history: the Tories are the odd ones out here, with little discernible ideology apart from on Brexit, where they stand disastrously divided.

Fourth, passion is back. Voter turnout surged in the US mid-terms, with both sides desperate to stop the other: the Blair-Cameron interregnum, and the idea that all politicians are the same, is long since forgotten. Politics matters again, and some observers are beginning to feel nostalgia for the apathy of the post Cold War, pre-financial crisis interlude.

Last but not least, both sides increasingly hate the other. What was once rivalry has turned into loathing, and opponents no longer believe in the other side’s legitimacy. Almost all of the changes triggered by the rise of identity politics are bad for liberal democracy; but the rise of the politics of personal destruction, the belief that those with whom we disagree must be evil, is undoubtedly the worst. It goes hand-in-hand with a rejection of the mainstream media and of the idea that policies should be judged on the basis of facts, not merely ideology.

Given all of this, what is the future for the Tories, especially if they betray Brexit voters? Do they really believe that they will escape punishment, that their pro-establishment fudge, when it comes, will be enough to hold out against the forces of identity politics? International politics is in a state of flux, yet the Government is still acting as if it were 1997 or 2005.

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