Social Europe: Parti Socialiste: Squeezed Between Macron And Mélenchon

The unions and parties of the left, were never historically, if you like, working together. There was always a clear separation. There’s even a charter, the Charter of Amiens, signed in 1906, an old text which really sets up this dramatic separation between the two sides, because simply, the unions did not trust the Socialist Party, which they considered far too parliamentarian, bourgeois, etc. [...]

Well, the strengths of the Socialist Party, and that’s not very original because that’s something you will find across the board in Europe with all social democratic parties is that, if you like, the Socialist Party, at least when it was electorally winning elections, was a party which was able to appeal to different constituencies, in terms of class, in terms of gender, in terms of age and generations, in terms of ethnicity. [...]

Any scholar, any student, of populism should look at France very carefully, because it’s really become the new battleground for all forms of populism, left-wing, right-wing, far right-wing, and you might argue to some extent, a centrist type of populism with Macron. In the end, all the ingredients, all the characteristics of populism are met by Macron.

One leader, fairly charismatic, trying to establish a direct relationship with people, with the nation, talk about recapturing sovereignty, or national, or popular democracy in some cases. All that is part of the usual populist narrative. It’s very strong, very buoyant in French politics. [...]

Now, it seems that the debate on Europe, it’s not a straightforward one. You have people still supporting Europe, but you also have, and I’m not talking here about extremes, left and right, you have a fairly mainstream opposition to Europe, not the idea or the concept of Europe. I think still the majority of the French people are attached to it, but to the institutions and the policies implemented on behalf of the EU. There’s a rising opposition to that. It’s becoming mainstream.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Jerusalem Gambit

Since then, 280,000 settlers have illegally moved in, and Israel has stripped 14,500 Palestinians of their residency rights, made it prohibitively difficult for the Palestinians who remain to get building permits, enacted discriminatory budgets, and provided municipal services unequally. [...]

In fact, Democrats have been pushing for this move for more than twenty-five years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both came into office saying they supported the decision, and, in 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which mandated that the United States move its embassy to Jerusalem. Thirty-two Democrats, including Joe Biden and John Kerry, cosponsored the bill. [...]

Israel has also become a lucrative arms market for US firms, and the ruling classes of both nations are so deeply enmeshed in sectors such as technology and security that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Put simply, Israel could not have committed its innumerable crimes against the Palestinians and others in the region at any approaching the scale that it has without the United States underwriting it financially, military, and politically. [...]

In the years after Oslo, the number of Israelis illegally settled in the West Bank — including East Jerusalem — has more than doubled. Gaza has been largely reduced to a prison camp where Israel has slaughters thousands, and Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination. The violence inherent in all these relationships underlines the fact that “peace” is a misnomer: better to think of the process as one more phase of colonization. [...]

Now Israel seems to be cultivating its own special relationship with Saudi Arabia. After Hariri’s resignation, Israel ordered its diplomats to echo Saudi talking points that claimed he quit because of Iranian meddling in Lebanon. In November, a senior Israeli military official told Saudi media that Israel will share intelligence on Iran with the Saudi state.

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Al Jazeera: Trump, tribalism and the end of American capitalism

A strong market economy needs a robust middle class, mechanisms for upward mobility, and clear rule of law to grow and sustain itself over time. US President Donald Trump has little allegiance to any of these.

In the rush to fulfil campaign promises and sate the greed of corporate backers, Trump and his Republican enablers are re-organising US tax policy in favour of the rich, gutting regulations and higher education, and ignoring long-standing norms and protections against conflicts of interest. [...]

In the early 20th century, carmaker Henry Ford understood that the US economy worked best when you have a thriving middle-class. In fact, part of his rationale for raising wages was his implicit understanding that the company needed a middle class consumer base that would buy the Model T vehicles that Ford plants were producing. [...]

Racism functions a lot like tribalism in other contexts because it fosters pre-capitalist thinking. Rather than voting along class-based lines formed by shared economic interests, both tribalism and racism foster group thinking that cuts across class lines. As such, poor white workers are led to believe that they have more in common with their white capitalist bosses than their fellow workers of colour. [...]

Living in a country where the president remains heavily invested in businesses he promotes regularly and has a son-in-law as a key adviser, does not feel like the country I used to know as the US. While the US business sector may always seek to lower costs and maximise profits, it also needs a robust consumer base, a well-educated workforce, and an even-handed state to apply rules and regulations and hold all actors to the same standard.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Politics and Emotion

A revolution in feeling: How the Enlightenment forged our understanding of human emotion and the ways in which this relates to the contemporary political world. Laurie Taylor talks to the literary historian, Rachel Hewitt, Russell Foster, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of European and International Studies King's College London and to Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Director, Research Development and Environment, Cardiff School of Journalism, Cardiff University

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Vox: The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.  

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference. [...]

As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.”

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