“The last time globalization transformed the world so thoroughly, in the early twentieth century, the ensuing backlash led to liberalism’s first catastrophic fail. In those years, liberals consistently failed to understand that the ground had shifted under them. In Russia, Bolsheviks took power from the weak crew of potential democratic reformers that had overthrown the tsar, inspiring a handful of movements in Europe that attempted something similar. In Germany, illiberal politicians took aim at the cosmopolitan values of the Weimar Republic. In Italy and Spain, leaders adopted virulent nationalism, challenging incipient global institutions like the League of Nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, Japanese ultra-militarists easily dispatched the weak Taisho democracy. Meanwhile, in the United States, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin built large followings by railing on the radio against communists, Wall Street, and “the international money-changers in the temple,” though they failed to take power in the era of a charismatic liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Where liberalism survived, it did so largely by absorbing some of the strategies of the illiberal communists and fascists, namely relying on the state to keep the economy afloat, as Roosevelt did with his New Deal policies. This lesson carried over into the post-World War II-era in which American liberals continued to embrace New Deal principles that would culminate in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and European liberals embraced the compromises that would eventually produce the European Union. At the global level, nations of various ideological dispositions came together to create a set of institutions — the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — meant to ensure some degree of permanent stability. Economic globalization resumed, but this time in a regulatory environment that, initially, seemed to spread the benefits more equally.
That all changed in the 1970s when, in one country after another, a new generation of liberals and conservatives began to dismantle those very regulations in hopes that an unfettered market would jump-start growth globally. However, only after China embraced capitalism and the Soviet Union collapsed did economic globalization take a quantum leap to true globalization. With it the world returned to Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth and inequality. No surprise, then, that the instability and intolerance of that long-gone era has returned as well.
Leaders like Putin, Erdogan, and Trump aren’t just politically savvy, nor have they simply been lucky or unusually ruthless. Instead, they sensed the changing mood of a moment and were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built, a discontent that won’t disappear simply because right-wing populists are exposed as frauds, incompetents, or cheats. Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.”
The potential danger the populist right poses to the political system we have, cannot be underestimated.
2 comments
June 6, 2019 at 9:55 am
Bill Malcolm
Well, I call that the “once over lightly” history of the 20th century world. Kinda. Sorta. Maybe. Plus I never did understand what Americans mean when they say “liberal”. It’s about as fuzzy a term as what they dub socialism, and that’s what they regard rules the roost in Canada. Loudmouths would go on about it even as harper was trying to ruin us, so I pay scant attention to short screeds like this. Lumping Putin, Erdogan and Trump together as people who “were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built” is about what a 12 year old would say for a history project, and I don’t believe it’s correct. Americans got fed up with unresponsive federal government sold out to lobbyists and bought Trump’s BS, Putin came about in reaction to the rape of Russia in the 1990s by internal and external capitalists, and Erdogan basically stole power quite openly and is now your regular tinpot nitwit.
Alberta is the place that was always to the right, felt the rest of the Canada should be like them, by constantly moaning they weren’t listened to, and corrupted the NDP into a petrowarrior party cheering on ever more bitumen extraction and pipelines. How does that fit into the author’s extrememly shallow take on things? Alberta has been the root of the real right in Canada for generations.
LikeLike
June 7, 2019 at 10:22 am
The Arbourist
@Bill Malcolm
Fair enough, but part of the neo-liberal process is the disenfranchisement of genuine political activity in society, while purporting to be all for fundamental democratic values.
This unresponsiveness, as you say, is a feature not a bug in the current political system and the general population, at least in the US had had enough of being glad handed by the inauthentic opposition democrats in the US.
The current neo-liberal policies world wide, fundamentally, create precarious conditions for the working class. This insecurity presents itself in the shift rightward we’ve seen in the EU, US, and Canada.
I think the oil stance the ANDP took was one of the few options available to them. They tried to balance resource extraction was environmental responsibility. It wasn’t great, but at least they were trying.
The reunification of the right in Alberta was their death knell though. Once the jobs jobs jobs herd has a place to unthinkingly park their vote, it the election result was essentially preordained. :(
LikeLike