“Preposterous” Peter Hartcher is grabbing at the pearls again today as he fears the rise of the “right wing populists”:
The leaders of the new Anglo-American political reality, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, were not right-wing populists to begin with. They are both shrewd opportunists who have found a popular wave and ridden it to high office. It so happens to be the same wave in the US and Britain.
Trump once championed universal health care on the Canadian or Australian model, for example, but later devoted himself to destroying it once that became politically useful. The Republican President was once a registered Democrat. He’s changed his political party affiliation five times.
Similarly, Johnson was a Tory in the Margaret Thatcher mould. Now he’s promising an enormous expansion of government spending and the role of the state. The former Tory chairman, Chris Patten, says of Johnson: “He’s not interested in governing — he’s interested in getting to the top. He’s capable of anything. He doesn’t believe in anything except Boris Johnson.”For Trump and Johnson, it really is all about winning. The first achievement of right-wing populism was, through men such as these two, to storm the bastions of the centre-right establishment. The movement’s impulses of nationalism, xenophobia, protectionism and populism now inhabit the logistics shell that was left behind when the US Republican and British Conservative parties jettisoned all their principles and policies to make way for the new wave.
Jeez, what garbage. All pollies want to win above all else. Most are pathological narcissists to boot. That doesn’t make them all “right wing populists”.
To bring some rationality to this discussion let’s first define “populism”. It’s not just being “popular”. It is to pretend to be “of the people” while you’re not actually “for the people”. An oligarch in working class clothing is a populist. Bread and circuses is the populist’s modus operandi.
Donald Trump qualifies. He has distracted US working classes with “walls” and racial slurrs while gutting taxes for the 1% and corporations.
But is Bojo the same? He’s acted upon a popular vote commissioned by someone else to shift the UK out of the EU. The economic price for that is less bankers and higher wages as immigration has fallen along with the pound. Is that “right wing”? No.
BoJo has promised carbon neutrality, big spends on public health care, and an Australian-style immigration system. Is that “populist” or “right wing”? No.
That’s because BoJo is neither populist nor right wing. His policies are centre-left which isn’t at all contradicted by throwing in a bit of nationalist spirit.
Preposterous Pete’s bizarre narrative has virtually nothing to do with Britain or Brexit. It is has nothing much to do with reality, for that matter. It is a circular argument. He assumes figments of globlisation are always good and sets about labelling stuff to prove it.
More to the point, Preposterous Pete wants to position the Australian globalisation debate in this fictional narrative so that we see all immigration cuts as evil, presumably to protect his employer’s profits, and out of some extreme commitment to globalisation, even when it turns into a destructive force for local workers, and for the democracy itself.
The Western pushback against globalistion is an overdue couter-reformation, a “new nationalism” that seeks to curb the excesses of extreme globlisats and their impact on workers. It crosses over easy left versus right boundaries. Some are using it for good (BoJo) and some for evil (Trumpo, though his China stuff is terrific). But both are winning for the simple reason that they are right.
The first Aussie politician to wake up will win as well. Morrison has already won the impossible election by dipping his toe in.
Globlisation as it was constituted is dead. Freewheeling global capital is destructive and being abused by the authoritarian states. That doesn’t mean the end of trade. Open borders mass immigration is not always right. Those that value local culture and values are not always troglodytes. That does not mean the end of multiculturalism.
The most dangerous voices in this debate are the extremists, either for nationalism or for open borders. They are the ones that open the way for genuine populists.
Folks like Domain’s immigration realtor-in-chief, Preposterous Pete.
