CityLab: What Is Really Behind the Populist Surge?

In a detailed study, the researchers take close look at the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. They follow the political theorist Cas Mudde in defining populists has sharing three key characteristics. They are anti-establishment, having faith in “plain talkers” and “ordinary people” as opposed to the “corrupt establishment” of business, government, academia, and media. They are authoritarian, favoring strong leaders over democratic institutions and traditions. They are nativist, putting their nation first. [...]

But that’s not the story Inglehart and Norris advance. They argue that populism is the result of a burgeoning cultural backlash against modern values of globalism, multicultural tolerance, and openness to diversity. Echoing themes political theorist Benjamin Barber outlined three decades ago in his 1992 Atlantic story “Jihad versus McWorld,” this is a cultural recoil against the “cosmopolitan” globalist one-two punch of “open societies” and “open borders.” [...]

While populist parties get somewhat more support from the white working class, they do not draw much from other hard-hit groups, especially those in urban areas. Indeed, support for populism is much stronger among relatively more affluent and educated groups, particularly the petite bourgeoisie of small business owners (which Marx long ago predicted). [...]

Support for populism is concentrated among white people, older people, men, religious people, and the less educated—groups that feel most threatened by the shift to more open cosmopolitan values. “[T]he combination of several standard demographic and social controls (age, sex, education, religiosity and ethnic minority status) with cultural values can provide the most useful explanation for European support for populist parties,” they write.

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Jacobin Magazine: Defeat in Victory

First of all, the PVV won in purely numerical terms. Wilders managed to increase his vote to thirteen percent, giving him twenty of one hundred fifty parliamentary seats.

Meanwhile, the two government parties — the free-market conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the center-left Labour Party (PvdA) lost significantly. [...]

To the PVV’s five seats, we should add the two seats claimed by the new Forum for Democracy — the Netherlands’ answer to the United States’ alt-right. During the campaign, party leader Thierry Baudet called for ending the “homeopathic dilution of the Dutch people” by foreigners. He has also claimed in his writings that all women secretly long to be raped.

Apart from these numerical gains, the far right managed to set the agenda for the entire campaign season. Both the VVD and the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), which ended at nineteen seats, waged a more explicitly racist and Islamophobic campaign than ever before. [...]

Thus, Wilders gained both numbers and political influence. He lost only in comparison to the even larger gains granted to him in the virtual reality the polling agencies created. This demands an important aside, for in recent years such opinion polls themselves have become a major force in politics. [...]

The rot goes deeper: the PvdA did not come in first in a single municipality, ranking fourth in Amsterdam and fifth in places like Zaanstad and Groningen, once cradles of the Dutch socialist movement. In working-class Rotterdam, still Europe’s largest harbor and a city where social democracy once was completely hegemonic, the PvdA came in seventh.

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Jacobin Magazine: Ignoring Antisemitism’s Threat

On March 2, vandals attacked the third Jewish cemetery in less than two weeks, in one case knocking down or damaging 539 large headstones. Since the beginning of 2017, there have been at least 128 bomb threats at 87 different Jewish community centers and schools across the country.

Despite the increase in bomb threats and vandalism directed at the Jewish community since his inauguration, Donald Trump waited weeks to publicly condemn the attacks, doing so only after a public outcry and criticism from government officials and some prominent Jewish leaders. [...]

For example, an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz titled “The Five Top Jewish Leaders More Concerned With Threats to Trump Than to US Jews,” notes that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who “has always prided himself on condemning antisemitism wherever and whenever it happens,” has been notably silent, appearing to follow Trump’s lead on how to talk — or not talk — about the issue.

When asked directly about the surge of anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States and Trump’s lack of response, Netanyahu said: “There is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than Donald Trump. I think we should put that to rest.” [...]

The specter of Zionists leaders lining up to support an administration with at best a cavalier attitude regarding its Jewish citizens’ safety may appear to undermine the idea of Israel as protector of world Jewry. But such unholy alliances are part and parcel of the Zionist political tradition.

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Haaretz: Even at the Risk of Angering Russia, Israel Working to Keep Iran Away From Its Border

Netanyahu, speaking to journalists who had accompanied him to China, said he made it clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel would continue to attack arms convoys, adding that Moscow hadn’t changed its policy about such Israeli strikes. This was a response to the claim by Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations that Russia had told Israel to halt its airstrikes. [...]

Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot described Israel’s policy goals as unchanged from what they were more than five years ago, shortly after Syria’s civil war began: keeping Israel out of the actual fighting but trying to prevent arms transfers to Hezbollah. [...]

The question Israel’s leadership must ask itself now is whether this change in circumstances requires a change in Israeli policy – or in other words, when is a string of airstrikes that are tactical successes liable to create strategic risk by spurring Syria into a harsher response, or alternatively by persuading Moscow to send a strongly worded cease-and-desist message (which, according to Netanyahu, hasn’t yet happened). [...]

Last month, during his visit to Washington to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, Netanyahu also articulated another goal: He asked Trump for American recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan. To date, the international community has not recognized the 1981 annexation, but Netanyahu may perceive an opportunity with the ongoing Syrian civil war, global criticism of the Assad regime and Trump’s avowals of support for Israel since taking office.

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Haaretz: Bibi the Invincible: Netanyahu Is Acting Irrationally but Political Arithmetic Is in His Favor

Benjamin Netanyahu looks like he’s playing with fire. His ongoing crusade to strangle at birth the new public broadcasting corporation, scheduled to begin operations on April 30, has put him on a collision course with both the entire political and media establishments.

With the exception of a small handful of toadying ministers and members of Knesset, and a few hundred employees in the soon-to-be disbanded Israel Broadcasting Authority, just about no one in Israel understands what he’s fighting for, or at least claims to be fighting for. Not even the majority among the prime minister’s supporters in Likud, many of whom have openly questioned the wisdom of threatening to hold early elections if Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon doesn’t agree to defund the new corporation, also called Kan (Here), and to keep IBA alive. [...]

Then there’s the “weekend effect” theory: that Netanyahu routinely changes his mind after family Shabbat meals, when his wife Sara and elder son Yair egg him on to confront his enemies, real and imagined. The timing of the latest twist in the saga gives some credence to this theory. Last Thursday evening Netanyahu and Kahlon agreed that Kan would begin broadcasting on schedule and that the coalition during the next Knesset session would pass a new media regulation law, giving the government control over all public broadcasting. Then along came Shabbat eve and the next day Netanyahu had ditched the agreement and was threatening early elections if Kahlon didn’t back down. [...]

Netanyahu truly believes he is omnipotent. Just look how he beat down all opposition to his grand designs for exploiting the natural gas finds off Israel’s coastline. It’s all coming together exactly as planned and the protesters can go to hell. Everything is working for him. He decides to designate “smart transportation” as the government’s priority and in a matter of weeks Intel writes a $15.3 billion check for Mobileye. His critics accuse Netanyahu of isolating Israel due to his intransigence over the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, but barely a day goes by when he doesn’t host in Jerusalem another president, prime minister or foreign minister from every corner of the globe.

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The Atlantic: Can the Country Survive Without a Strong Middle Class?

But in a powerful new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, the Vanderbilt legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the Constitution doesn’t merely require a particular political system but also a particular economic one, one characterized by a strong middle class and relatively mild inequality. A strong middle class, Sitaraman writes, inspires a sense of shared purpose and shared fate, without which the system of government will fall apart. [...]

Prior to the American Constitution, most countries and most people who thought about designing governments were very concerned about the problem of inequality, and the fear was that, in a society that was deeply unequal, the rich would oppress the poor and the poor would revolt and confiscate the wealth of the rich.

The answer to this problem, the way to create stability out of what would have been revolution and strife, was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, you have the House of Lords for the wealthy, the House of Commons for everyone else. Our Constitution isn’t like that. We don’t have a House of Lords, we don’t have a House of Commons, we don’t have a tribune of the plebs like they had in ancient Rome. [...]

James Harrington is one of the most important political philosophers that no one’s ever heard of. In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth, because at the time, most wealth was property.

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Vox: 5 ways to think about the remarkable slowdown in global CO2 emissions

But over the past three years, something genuinely shocking has happened. Global CO2 emissions from energy have stayed flat, even as the world economy has kept chugging along, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. It’s the first time that’s happened without a sharp economic slowdown (as in the early 1980s): [...]

This pause in CO2 emissions growth, the IEA says, was driven by “growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, as well as structural changes in the global economy.” Notably, US energy-related emissions fell 1.6 percent in 2016, thanks to the ongoing shift from coal to cleaner natural gas, wind, and solar. Chinese coal consumption appears to be declining (though stats can be unreliable there), led by a shift away from heavy industry. And Europe’s emissions stayed flat last year. [...]

Deep decarbonization means changing all of that — electrifying sectors that can be electrified (like heating or transport) and advancing cleaner technologies for the rest (like carbon capture for cement, or biofuels for airplanes). Plus dealing with forestry, agriculture, and so on. In many cases, we’ve barely begun. [...]

The good news is that scientists and companies are slowly developing techniques for controlling methane: infrared cameras to detect (and help plug) methane leaks from natural gas pipelines; new types of feed that cause cows to belch less (no, really); even new genetically engineered rice varieties that don’t transfer as much methane from flooded paddies into the atmosphere. It’s solvable. And methane lingers in the atmosphere for a much shorter period than CO2, so action here would show quick results.

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Al Jazeera: Kurds in Iraq ring in the new year

Kurds across the world were celebrating Newroz, the first day of their traditional calendar, on Tuesday. Festivities in Iraq's Kurdish region began the previous evening, marking the start of a public holiday that allows families to come together and celebrate.

The ancient festival marks the first day of spring and the vernal equinox. Akre, a town of around 20,000 people nestled between the mountains of northern Iraq, hosts one of the most popular and visually spectacular celebrations, drawing visitors from throughout the region.

Despite the ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in its Mosul stronghold, attendance was high. Families dressed up for the occasion, with men in traditional clothing, modern suits or military uniforms, and women in layers of bright, sequined fabrics.

Fireworks lit up the skies even during the daytime, while at dusk, torchlit processions snaked their way through the mountains. The flames refer to the legend of a blacksmith named Kaveh who defeated an evil king and then set the hillsides ablaze in celebration, while also signifying the light of spring and hopes for a bright future. 

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Politico: True Finns’ dilemma: power or populism?

Since then, however, the pragmatism required of a governing party has toned down their strident Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant rhetoric. From 15 percent in the 2011 elections, a repeat performance in 2015 that showed they were not just a flash in the pan, and a peak of 20 percent support in opinion polls, the party has sagged to 8 percent. Now they are wondering how to get their mojo back.

“In opposition, it’s easier to be a populist as you don’t have to make compromises. Some supporters had unrealistic expectations of just how much the True Finns would be able to shape the government’s immigration policy,” said Tommi Kotonen, a researcher specializing in right-wing extremism at the University of Jyväskylä. [...]

Such divisions are nothing new to a party founded 20 years ago from the remains of the Finnish Rural Party, which mostly represented unemployed rural workers until it was rebranded by Soini. The party opposed globalization, free-market capitalism and elites in general, and its Finnish name — Perussuomalaiset —  is closer to “ordinary Finns” than “true Finns,” prompting the party to argue that it should be translated into English as “The Finns party.” While firmly to the right on immigration and social issues, its economic policy has traditionally been more to the left, with insiders jokingly referring to themselves as a worker’s party without socialism.

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