Ob in #Deutschland, den #USA, #Frankreich oder sonst wo, der rechte #Kulturkampf ist vor allem deshalb erfolgreich, weil der materielle Wohlstand weiter Teile der Arbeiter- und Mittelschicht durch steigende Lebenshaltungskosten evaporiert.

Gleichzeitig fehlt eine positive (demokratische) Zukunftsperspektive, weshalb auch immer mehr Junge hart nach rechts driften. Die rechte Propaganda auf Social Media, aus dem In- wie Ausland (#Putin) rennt offene Türen ein. 1/2

#depol #eupol #chpol #populism

Liam Byrne has a good line on populism:

'Populism today is not simply a movement of grievance. It is a venture, with investors and revenue models. It thrives on the same forces that have reshaped global finance: speed, scale, opacity and the monetising of volatility....

[And] they are incentivised to keep countries in a permanent state of agitation. When volatility becomes the product, calm becomes the enemy'!

Populism is essentially disaster capitalism

#Populism #politics
h/t FT

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Anton Jäger. Review.

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Anton Jäger 

Was America, asks Anton Jäger, citing Jean Baudrillard, in the late 1980s showing signs of hysteresis, “the process by which something continues to develop by inertia whereby an effect persists even when its cause has disappeared” ? Lacking real international opposition from an anti-capitalist alternative – the Stalinist model – Washington’s enemies, one would evidently underline Iran, exist but without offering serious competition.

The final chapter of Hyperpolitics suggests that Baudrillard’s ‘end of History’ reflections, that history is “splintering into scattered fragments” may be ending. That, “events and conflicts from the age of industrial modernity appear to be resurfacing”, if it is not clear whether as “disembodied virtual phenomena” or if “this time history is really returning.”

The ‘populist moment’ of leader focused parties ‘insurgant’ parties (Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession 2023) has faltered on the left. One notes that even La France insoumise now focuses on mobilising la Nouvelle France and not the promotion of Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself.

Anton Jäger offers a stimulating reflection on the replacement of ‘postpolitics, by ‘hyperpolitics’ . This is a world where viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish from one to another.

And yet….One hesitates to describe the battles over anti-Semitism, Gaza, the attack on Iran Islamism, mass murder and genocides, in this vein. in social media exchanges sometimes hallucinatory that they may be, there is hard as nails real reference, not things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.

The term hyperpolitics works until it doesn’t. On the left, the ‘acephalous’ character of protest sometimes looks like an activist headless chicken. But the Greens in England and Wales, now joined by a certain Proudfoot, the leader of a groupuscule once cited by Jäger, the Northern Independence Party, have wind in their sails, mobilising feeling around cause, such as climate change and Gaza, resemble the conventional strategy of the Liberal Democrats, not anything new.

Perhaps it’s better to heed Jager’s suggestion that there is merit in a “re-institutionalisation of political engagement” on the left, based on long-term party/union membership and activism.

On the right, there is social media driven protest against migrants. But national populism is making an equally conventional bid for political power. This, with some echoes of Trump’s MAGA, is, in Farage’s Reform, and in France’s  Rassemblement national, through the conventional mechanisms of local and national elections. It promises if elected to send enormous shock waves to the Parliamentary and Presidential systems of these countries.

The limits to cultural criticism in politics can be shown by referring back to where we started from.

In the 1980s Jean Baudrillard, through the medium of his chronicles in Le Monde, was popular on the critical French left. His articles, collected in the book La Gauche Divine (1985), presented an analysis of how President Mitterrand came to power in France and how political power seduced the French Left and became a simulacrum, a performance, a spectacle.

In the “nouvelle Société informative” people are kept alive, except “life” itself resembles the passengers in suspended animation in the spacecraft Discovery, controlled by computer HAL. The Socialists (then in power), “occupent l’espace virtuel.” hiding from themselves the indifference of the masses for their ‘virtual’ politics.

In 1991 Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu). He claimed that people (that is those not taking part) were unable to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its hyper-real misrepresentation through simulacra.

All that remains of this polemic is that phrase.

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https://thewalrus.ca/how-albertas-separatist-movement-could-shake-north-america

This article traces the separatist movement back to 1980 and the response to the National Energy Program.

I'm not an expert on the history of Canada, still less that of Alberta, so I have no grounds for for contesting the article's claim about the beginnings of calls for separation.

I wonder, though, if the groundwork for the rise of separatism was laid by Alberta's distinctive political history from 1935 onwards. That year saw the election of a Social Credit government in the province; the right populist party would dominate the political landscape there for another 35 years.

The heritage of the Social Credit movement in Alberta, with its roots in evangelicalism and populist resentment of banks and distant metropolitan elites, might explain some (not all) of the current separatist movement's sympathies with Trumpish Americanism.

Understanding the rise of the Social Credit movement in Alberta matters not only for the history of Canada and of the Grest Depression in general, but also for our understanding of right wing populist movements.

In another part of the article...

#Alberta #Canada #Politics #CanadianHistory #Separatism #SocialCredit #History #Populism