The honey pot
- BBC Andrew Marr interviews Marine Le Pen French far right leader
- Trump advisor Michael Cohen on CNN pleads us to give Trump a chance
- UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson asks we stop whingeing over Trump
Listen to all that, after both bruising UK Brexit referendum and US presidential election, and we could be forgiven if we just suspend our belief and fall for this: it’s OK that that the European Union might break up and that the US might revert to its colonial past. You say: “… a common market was forged over fifty years ago to countervail World War II fissures?” They say: “Pah! Bruxelles is just a dictatorship…” And the US Electoral College makes a president of Trump, who garnered less votes than fellow Republicans Romney & McCain, both losers in 2012 & 2008? Pah! The 1787 Constitutional Convention instituted the Electoral College — Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” will tell you it assured the southern rural, conservative and economically challenged states thus protected their representation against the northern industrial, progressive & economically growing states —deep divisions go back to their colonial roots it seems.
Populism is music to the ears of socio-economically exhausted masses. Trotsky then Lenin struck a chord with depressed turn-of-the-previous-century Russia, Hitler with post-World War I Weimar Germany and Mao-Tse-Tung with post-Boxer movement China. At a much smaller scale, the recent sudden influx in Europe of millions of Middle-East, West Asian and African refugees creates an economic and emotional exhaustion too: state resources are stretched and underlying racial tensions flare up. And it’s “a bridge too far” for existing regimes installed in post- World War II relative wealth, but struggling after multiple recessions and the double-whammy of reduced tax base and increased benefits claimants. Is that not fertile ground for populism?
[Disclosure: as a French national in England, I help next year’s French national election effort for Mouvement Démocrate Europe du Nord, equivalent to British Liberal Democrats and Spanish Ciudadanos.]
London MoDem speaker Marianne Magnin said it best in her expose in French “I stand against populism”, paraphrasing highlights: Populism is an ideology to free the people without resorting to class struggle. The two main points peppered with a succinct recent history are 1) shortsightedness and over-exaggeration are evasions that lead up against the wall, and 2) disunited parties lose. In other words, by going straight to the people and addressing their lack of privilege, purported liberation movements bypass the privileged population, which in UK & US recently lead to surprise victories from the right. But this only works as a stopgap for pain points in that instant (fear of migrants in UK & flight of jobs overseas from the US, and distrust of the ruling elite in UK & US) but do not address the long-term class issues, and it only succeeded in light of crumbling incumbent regimes.
And by only addressing issues specific to the tranche of population for that period of time, matters are kept simple and easy to grasp. That is the honey pot that’s so attractive even your grandma will understand and grasp it. And that is why my banner montage shows France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Frauke Petry whose far right parties dream of a better populist future.
But as mentioned earlier here, that inward-looking naivete exposes a whole lot of risks with regards to our relations with other nations. Russia in particular has also turned populist ever since the fall of Communism a quarter century ago. China and the Middle East have not had the time-spans Europe and US had to develop their brands of democracy. So the honey pots looks today like a dangerous elixir at best, and a recipe for trouble at worst.
When visiting the Churchill bunker under London Whitehall, a volunteer told me this story I haven’t been able to corroborate: Charles de Gaulle apparently quipped to Winston Churchill, upon arriving in London after fleeing the Nazi advance on Paris, “the more things change the more they’re the same”. He apparently referred to the fact that Third Reich differed little from Prussia.
… Let us not allow populism to revive that metaphor in the 21st century!
