Distinguishing the symptom from the problem

[jsburbidge]

Amid all of the thoroughly disturbing headlines about Donald Trump, it's easy to overlook the really frightening thing about him: he's not the problem, but only a symptom of the problem. Roy Moore's selection in the Alabama primary, against a candidate endorsed by Trump, was evidence enough of that. Or consider the selection of Doug Ford as Ontario PC leader.

Just as the extended period of growth in North America between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970's led to a comparatively high degree of stability in government - the Ontario Conservative reign being an extreme example - increasing inequality in income and instability in jobs (driven in part by technological changes and in part by the impact of small government conservatism) has created a significant part of the population, both in the US and across the developed world, which is simply tired of politics as usual because they find the world increasingly less matched to their ways of life.

Furthermore, the practical constraints imposed by the modern global systems of trade, communications, and technology limit in some critical ways the scope of what governments can do to affect this. (That's not to say that some constraints aren't purely political. The tendency of governments to run deficits during periods of growth (i.e. not in a counter-cyclical Keynesian manner), including both "right-wing" governments (U.S. Republicans) and those further left (Ontario Liberals) limits what they can do before the bond markets come calling. This tendency is grounded in a much higher degree of grassroots opposition to raising taxes than used to apply. Looking at this from a few steps back, this is polities straightjacketing themselves: there's no fundamental reason more countries couldn't be like Finland.)

The pool of populist support reflects different demographics in different places. In Trumplandia, there's a heavy weighting with older white workers who see their status and relative prosperity slipping. In the UK, the Brexiteers are similarly white - more narrowly, identify as English - and older. But Ford Nation in Toronto has a significant block of non-white, poor voters who are much further down the status and income ladder. (Part of this reflects the fact that across a nation the rural discontent will tend to be older and more nativist: there's less diversity in rural areas, and the young leave for the cities when times are hard. But the Rob Ford phenomenon was, by definition, confined to Toronto. Canadian populism generally matches other countries' more closely if we look at instances like the choice of Scheer as CPC leader.)

All of the specific-to-the-US causes of Trump's success - the recent past of the Republican Party, the Electoral College, Clinton's unpopularity, the specifically American set of race relations problems - are swamped by an international wave of right-wing - "conservative" would be a misnomer - populism. (Even then, all of the factors together were barely enough to drag Trump over the finish line first. This is not an overwhelming tide.)

Oddly enough, though the Left has shown signs of growth of populism in Corbyn and Saunders, at present (at least) we're seeing centrist-left-establishment blocs versus right-populist blocs with comparatively little major impact from left-populist or radical left movements. Where is Occupy these days?

It is just possible that, five years from now, we could be looking at a Corbyn government in the UK, Saunders as president in the US, and Canada with an as yet unknown radical NDP leader with significant electoral support: stranger things have happened (but it won't be Jagmeet Singh, who looks likely to repeat the Layton / Mulcair approach of producing only mildly progressive policies in a bid to expand support). However, that's not currently the way to bet.

What I take away from this perspective is that, barring the (real) possibility of massive collapse under a Trump or Trump-like administration (multi-power war, global financial meltdown with weak government response, pandemic with weak public health response) the voters driving populism will reach the end of the term (or achieve Brexit, or some equivalent milestone) to find that their lot has actually worsened - the current crop of right / populist policies don't even try to address the real sources of malaise, and will tend to increase what is already a high Gini index. They will be even angrier (although probably not with their preferred candidate: more likely with the establishment, the elites, "the swamp", the "deep state", or conspiracies they will see as having frustrated their heroes). The cycle will begin again, with the populist block primed for even more extreme rhetoric.

Similarly, a Ford Conservative government, if one is elected (and isn't a minority, which has its own constraints) is guaranteed to fail in finding "efficiencies" allowing it to cut taxes while avoiding deep cuts to programs. (Not to mention that some of Ford's promises are themselves expensive.) The most likely prediction would be four years of ineffective stasis with mounting headlines of low-level services with crises from lack of funds (schools, universities, hospitals, public housing, transit: like now, only worse).

Since the populist base is actually only a minority, it's also likely that the rest of the electorate, responding to incompetent government[1], would vote in the alternative, most likely a representative of Stross's "beige dictatorship", setting up an even more divided political landscape, with the possibility of civil unrest (especially in the US, given its love affair with guns). Lather, rinse, repeat.

Trump magnifies what was already a set of negative trends for the US. The Republicans didn't become populist because of Trump; they were unable to block him because they had already slid into the de facto grassroots control of the Tea Party. Trump's flailing around on trade and on diplomatic matters just accelerates, but does not cause, an ongoing shift towards a multipolar world. Likewise, Brexit has generated nothing new: the sentiments that drive it go back at least as far as the reign if Elizabeth I. And Doug Ford reflects, not Trumpian concerns, but a style of conservatism which was visible among the desk-thumping Tory backbenchers of the mid-20th Century.

No, the real problem is that this sort of broad backlash hampers any serious attempt to deal with major issues like anthropogenic climate change, major economic disruptions which will follow increasing automation and the deflation, if not collapse, of the carbon bubble, and cascading social change driven by an internetworked world.

[1]It's theoretically possible to have a competent populist (in the sense of "has policies which would genuinely be of benefit"), but (1) there don't seem to be any visible ones right now, (2) they would be unlikely to hew to the current shibboleths of right-wing populism (given the lack of contact of those shibboleths with the real world), and (3) that's when we start to have very different worries about the overturn of the established order.

Comments

[graydon]

I think you're applying more thought than this merits.

A system of social organization based on identifying a class who never has to admit they're wrong (think about this for a minute; who is displaying virtue when they admit error? who is surprising when they admit error? who is presumed to be in error? who is told what they've done wrong?) is resilient until destroyed by external change.

There's nothing else there. The whole point to the "right" is to never have to admit to being wrong. What about, the thing that's generating the fear of error, varies, but the core demand is that no one can ever insist they admit they're wrong. General prosperity requires high taxes; money is not a thing; cities exist to provide ease of connection to a diversity of skills. But if you're concerned for not being wrong, you build the social power to move blame. So long as you can move blame, well. There you go. You can be wrong, and someone else suffers for it. (I mean, for pity's sake, look at Galen Weston.)

I can't see any way to get this resolved in time to get an alternative food supply and a non-carbon economy in place before agriculture fails. I suspect the increasing stridency of politics has to do with this awareness starting to creep in to the general expectations.

[jsburbidge]

The thing is, there's always a class that holds itself right, but the way this shows up varies. The current populist flavour has its echoes in the past - Aberhart and Jackson, for two - but it hasn't been a common thing. Our western élites, at least, have tended towards the more subtle forms of abject failure.

My impression, although it may be wrong, is that the current problems afflicting the right (i. e. the people who used to be the parties of the City, Wall Street and Bay Street, within my own memory) come from the total collapse of an attempt to make cynical use of low-level small-c conservatism by allowing "direct democracy" into their selection processes, and the finding out that the transition was (1) irreversible in catastrophe theory ways and (2) generating results wildly divergent from what they wanted.

If the US still selected its candidates in smoke-filled rooms, Trump would not be President, and if Doug Ford had had to go through a convention of the sort Bill Davis had to he would not be the party leader. (David Cameron's hubris can he left to the Kindly Ones.)

[graydon]

You can't get off a local maximum without going (metaphorically) downhill. It's been obvious to the CEO class since the 80s that climate change is real and will be a catastrophe. Doing something about it -- getting off the fossil carbon local maximum -- means going downhill, and the machine they're riding can't do that. There's no way to pick loss of relative status for everybody. The only way to do that is to replace it with some other machine, and no one is interested in building that. (In part because it would have to be very, very ruthless indeed in at least some contexts.)

Going more democratic might have been an attempt at an end run to that problem, or a desire to have someone distinct to blame, or just because power is having people do what you say, and it wasn't working because the massive propaganda efforts of Fox News do matter. (Nihilistic death cults with good PR have been a problem before, too.) Doesn't really matter; shifting the never-admit-error category to include Doug Ford in this present context of the local maximum doesn't result in worse decision making.

I mean, really; anything that isn't national mobilization, full industrial rationalization, we're going to renewables, glass, and aluminium in toolkit that can make sewing machines and autoclaves and windows and doesn't need more than ~500,000 people to maintain, we're decarbonizing agriculture, and we're getting everyone fifty square meters of potato greenhouse as quickly as possible, is laughably inadequate. And it's not going to end; even if we did that, there'd be a millenium of uncertain food and weather, the seas will come up, and all the current housing stock is worthless. Rebuilding the entire transportation infrastructure. Making sure there's more than four places able to make LED lights. (none of them on this continent, last I checked...)

Trudeau can't even manage to be opposed to new fossil carbon that's going to cost him his job. Scheer is an innumerate death cultist. The NDP can't manage to escape their respectability trap and talk about actual facts instead of a lost golden age. It's not just the right that's having a problem with facts, it's broadly societal.

[jsburbidge]

Trudeau is a much better example of what you are describing - he supports the "correct" platitudes when it's cost-free but his actual record on carbon issues (and other matters requiring hard decisions) is laughable. He can't move away from a conventional politics which is inadequate to the scale of the issues he is dealing with even while he gives lip service to the importance of those issues.

Functioning effectively at a public level when things start to go nonlinear requires either a revolutionary or a truly arrogant aristocrat who happens to be more or less right. Our society is poor at generating either form of leadership right now.

[graydon]

I might have said [that] there's a third option -- numeracy -- but would have to agree that our society isn't doing well with that, either.

(I don't mean "can do arthimetic", I mean "the graph has emotional meaning" and "has developed a modicum of statistical intuition". So far as I can tell, there's an active effort to prevent those things from happening.)

I figure the most likely outcome is human extinction. I can imagine how to get from here to survival (absolutely required industrial culture and all) but I can't imagine how to do it with the existing power structure opposing it at ever turn, and I can't imagine how to run the guillotines for a year and keep general legitimacy of government.