The Guardian: Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy

It is correct that in Europe and the United States (at least in the case of Trump) less educated males are the main constituency of what is commonly referred to as populism; it is true that in surveys many voters register their sense that the country as a whole is declining (an assessment that does not necessarily depend on their personal economic situation; it is simply not true that every supporter of what can plausibly be classified as a populist party is an objective “loser in globalisation”). But all this is like saying that we best understand the intellectual content of social democracy if we keep redescribing its voters as workers envious of rich people. The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronising to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents. [...]

When in opposition, populists for sure criticise elites. But there is also always something else they do that is the tell-tale sign of populism: they claim that they, and only they, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing his critics in the country: “We are the people. Who are you?” Of course, he knew that they were Turks, too.

The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. Populists’ political competitors and critics are inevitably condemned as part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say when running for office; once in government, they will not recognise anything such as a legitimate opposition. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people at all: there are American citizens, and then there are what George C Wallace, an arch-populist of the 1960s often viewed as a precursor of Trump, always called “real Americans” (white, God-fearing, hard-working, gun-owning and so on). Thus, populists do not just claim: we are the 99%. According to their own logic, they actually have to say: we are the 100%. [...]

More worryingly still: when populists have sufficiently large majorities in parliament, they try to build regimes that might still look like democracies, but are actually designed to perpetuate the power of the populists (as supposedly the only authentic representatives of the people). To start with, populists colonise or “occupy” the state. Think of Hungary and Poland as recent examples. One of the first changes Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz sought after coming to power in Hungary in 2010 was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable them to place loyalists in what should have been non-partisan bureaucratic positions. Both Fidesz and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland also immediately moved against the independence of courts. Media authorities were captured; the signal went out that journalists should not report in ways that violate the interests of the nation (which were equated with the interests of the governing party). Whoever criticised any of these measures was vilified as doing the bidding of the old elites, or as being outright traitors (Kaczyński spoke of “Poles of the worst sort” who supposedly have “treason in their genes”).

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The Guardian: Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen: one of them will shape Europe’s future

Two very different women hold Europe’s future in their hands – and neither of them is Theresa May. The battle for Europe’s soul is being waged between Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen. This is a clash of personalities and visions: Germany’s chancellor v the leader of France’s Front National, the largest far-right party in Europe. As Britain prepares to leave the EU, the Franco-German dimension of the continent’s destiny has arguably never been so important since the end of the cold war. What is at stake is momentous: whether Europe can survive as a project, and whether fundamental principles such as the rule of law, democracy and tolerance can be salvaged. The battle will play out nationally in 2017, in key elections in France and Germany, but it concerns all Europeans. [...]

These two women have one thing in common and one thing only: the depth of their political conviction. Angela Merkel has been unwavering in her message that welcoming refugees is the right thing to do; Le Pen fumes against “rampant Islamisation” of the continent. Merkel wants to save the European project; Le Pen is fully aligned with forces that want to dismantle it (she recently said on CNN that France had become an EU “province”). Merkel nurtures the transatlantic link; Le Pen admires Putin’s Russia – her party sits at the heart of pro-Kremlin networks in Europe, financial ones among them. Le Pen’s ideology draws from France’s historical far right, the ideas of Charles Maurras and colonial racism; Merkel is the daughter of a Protestant pastor for whom individual freedoms are paramount values. Le Pen has always made much about being divorced and smoking cigarettes (trying to cast herself in the image of a modern woman); Merkel’s personal style is more subdued, which isn’t to say her character is less ironclad.

For decades what drove the European project was the so-called “Franco-German engine”. It is now all but broken – mainly because of France’s economic weaknesses, which have severely unbalanced the relationship. What now drives European politics is a different kind of Franco-German equation, one in which Merkel, often faulted for her eurozone policies, has on several occasions attempted to give France’s socialist government some financial breathing space against Le Pen – including by sparing France the wrath of the EU commission for disrespecting deficit targets.

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Politico: What Republicans Really Have to Do to Win Over Black Voters

Granted, Trump and his open bigotry ascending to the top of the party have done enormous harm to the cause and might reverberate for the next couple of decades. [...]

Let’s get a few things straight. You won’t be able to win over black voters by simply explaining the benefits of conservatism better, or reminding black voters that Frederick Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln, was a Republican, or that a sizable percentage of the party voted for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s and that the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was a young man, while neglecting to remind listeners he spent the rest of his life apologizing and trying to make up for that misstep. [...]

That’s why any meaningful attempt to reach black voters won’t begin with claiming that Democratic policies have all failed—as Trump obnoxiously said the other week, telling African-Americans their lives are so terrible they have “nothing to lose” by voting for him—because that’s simply not true. In the years before the war on poverty began, 55 percent of black Americans lived in poverty—a number that has since been cut in half, down to roughly 26 percent. Not only that, 71 percent of single black moms lived in poverty in 1959, a number that is down to about 37 percent. (Curiously, no conservative I’ve read has ever noted that while the much-discussed black out-of-wedlock rate has been climbing the past few decades the rate of poverty in single-female-led black families has been going down.) [...]

In the minds of black voters, the GOP is hostile to health reform that is saving and improving their lives; hostile to Wall Street regulations designed to prevent a repeat of an economic downturn the American Civil Liberties Union calculates will be costing black Americans dearly for maybe another decade and a half; hostile to economic initiatives by the nation’s first black president; and pretend not to hear when communities of color scream that one of the most vital solutions to curbing gun violence is doing something about the guns themselves. When black people bring up any of these issues to many conservatives, they are either ridiculed, told that what they are experiencing can’t really be so, or that a simple adoption of conservative values and principles—whatever that means in the age of Trump—is the elixir for black people’s ills.

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FiveThirtyEight: What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do? Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen. No conditions. No questions. Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live. [...]

He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S. [...]

Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger. [...]

Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state. Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs. Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.” [...]

Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation — to address social ills by just giving people money — has a long history.

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Al Jazeera: The evolution of Islamists

With the opening up of political space during the interwar period, the Muslim Brotherhood positioned itself as a movement that preached social reforms supporting the country's continued modernisation while adhering to Islamic principles.

At a time when there appeared an increasing divide between the country's political and religious elites and the latter seemed incapable of challenging their effective marginalisation, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, believed that ordinary people could advocate on behalf of their religious ideals. 

As such, the Muslim Brotherhood was not a traditional movement from a bygone era. Far from it. It maintained an intricate structure with elected representatives at various levels of the organisational hierarchy. [...]

What is truly ironic is that, as Islamist parties gradually acquire a more "secular" outlook to their interpretation of the needs of contemporary democratic politics, several authoritarian rulers have increasingly begun to employ traditional Islamic arguments to justify their hold on power.

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