Politico: How billionaires learned to love populism

Once Trump took office, he went full billionaire, and it seemed at first that his entire populist pose was revealed as a sham. He appointed the wealthiest Cabinet in modern history; his agencies are studded with high-level corporate executives. Speaking to a crowd of cheering supporters in Iowa in June 2017, Trump said, “I love all people, rich or poor. But in these particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” [...]

There are a number of familiar explanations for how Trump gets away with all of this. One is that it’s all a con. Trump is an incredible salesman, the thinking goes, and he’s duping the white working class on behalf of a new set of overlords who put on their MAGA hats and sell false hope and snake-oil policies. Another explanation is that it’s all racism. Some of his white supporters from lower-income households are fine with the wealthy making off like bandits, as long as they can comfortably look down on immigrants and others of racial minority groups. [...]

America today is fully in the grip of political tribalism, and people who think that Trump’s billionaire populism is just a con are missing something fundamental. As Yale professor Dan Kahan has found, Americans’ political positions today, both liberal and conservative, are driven much less by individual self-interest than by “loyalty to important affinity groups.” What voters often care most about is having their team — their political tribe — win. And for millions of lower-income Americans, Trump has done a remarkable job presenting himself as being on their team, creating a tribal bond between a celebrity billionaire and blue-collar voters, while excluding the “elites” in the middle. [...]

When people long to rise, but can’t, what then? For many on the left, the response is to denounce inequality and to expose the American dream as a sham. The wealth of the super-rich is “obscene,” says Bernie Sanders, along with many other liberals; what’s needed is sweeping redistribution, regulation and institutional reform. For some voters, this is inspiring — Bernie, too, cuts through the niceties of elite tastemaking — but for a lot of Americans, it’s an alien way of thinking about the nation they grew up in. Americans have an overwhelmingly positive view of free enterprise and a far more negative view of the federal government and socialism. Americans also famously overestimate the degree of upward mobility in this country — the poor more so than the wealthy. [...]

In recent years, however, a number of other billionaire populist leaders have risen in developed countries. The most prominent is Silvio Berlusconi, the jet-setting media mogul who served as Italy’s prime minister for nine years. Berlusconi was infamous for his “bunga bunga” parties with prostitutes, and like Trump, he made crude jokes, publicly mocked women and was accused by his enemies of shady business dealings. He also sparked a global outcry in 2001 when he declared that Western civilization was superior to Islamic culture. (At 81, Berlusconi has now reinvented himself as a moderate.) More recently, Andrej Babiš, a billionaire and his country’s second-richest man, was elected president of the Czech Republic, campaigning on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform. 

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: The White Working Class

The white working class - are they the left behind? Noam Gidron, a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University, asks if the right wing, populist vote is a reflection of the declining social status of this group. He's joined by Gurminder Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex, who argues that a concern with economic disadvantage, when talking about the election of Trump, as well as Brexit, has led to a new 'identity politics' of race - one where class takes second place to 'whiteness'. The writer and broadcaster, Kenan Malik, joins the discussion.

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Quartz: What China’s Xi Jinping wants with all that power

Xi often speaks of the importance of the “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation, and of the ambitious and tricky tasks the country must navigate over the next 15 or so years: become more uniformly prosperous, repair the environment, and turn China into the world’s biggest power. To do all that, Xi believes that the party must be at the center of everything, and he himself at the center of the party. [...]

After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, who had been a political target, returned to the inner circle of the party, and soon maneuvered his way into becoming its most powerful leader. He quickly decided to introduce collective leadership—highlighted, among other things, by a power-transfer mechanism—to prevent the rise of another Mao-like personality cult. In a new constitution ratified in 1982, the presidency was restored with a two-term, 10-year limit. A retirement rule for Chinese officeholders was put in place for the first time, and China was set apart from other authoritarian regimes by having a process for orderly leadership succession. [...]

Xi, who spearheaded a dramatic crackdown on corruption and dissent, as well as a slew of legal reforms under the rhetoric of “rule of law,” may not want to do things that way. “It might be that he has less faith in the efficacy of informal power versus more formal institutional power, and that might be a lesson he learned from Deng’s experience,” Sam Crane, a Chinese politics expert at Williams College in Massachusetts, told Quartz.  [...]

Xi’s move “makes sense with how he views both Gorbachev’s and [his predecessor] Hu’s [Jintao] governance failures—basically that they allowed the state to strengthen at the expense of the Party, straining the linkage between the two and allowing for the existence of a state without a Party,” wrote Jessica Teets, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont.  

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Vox: How politicians troll the media

 Between Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) secret memo, allegations of missing text messages, and the panic over a so-called “secret society” in the FBI, the past few weeks of political news coverage have been dominated by Republican pseudoscandals. And while each of these alleged “bombshells” has turned out to be a dud, these stories raise questions about whether GOP politicians are intentionally baiting journalists -- trolling them into covering conspiracy theories in order to raise doubts about the FBI and the ongoing Mueller investigation. 

Quartz: Future of Food: Farming in the age of climate change

 Unpredictable weather patterns are forcing farmers to adopt new methods to maintain a viable business while making food production as efficient as possible.

A small farm in south Dakota has turned to organic farming and invested in their dirt while others have taken climate out of the equation and invested in hydroponics, growing vegetables in large warehouses.

In the last of our What Happens Next, we explore the future of food through farming.

Vox: Why so many Westerners feel like democracy has failed them

People no longer feel that the political system is actually delivering for them. I think there are three primary drivers of the rise of populism. One of them is the stagnation of living standards for ordinary people. From 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled. From 1965 to 1985, it doubled again. [...]

A lot of this discontent is driven by economic concerns, but the form it takes is cultural or racial. We have to recognize that we’re in the middle of a unique historical experiment: We’ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones, which is what’s happening in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Some of these countries were always multiethnic, but they also had a clear racial hierarchy in which some people had advantages over others. [...]

Our system has failed at one of the core ambitions of a democracy, which is to translate popular views into public policies. That’s because of the role of money in our politics, because of the revolving door between legislators and lobbyists, and because the political class has become separated from the bulk of the population. [...]

For people who have come of age in the last 30 years, it was easy to just focus on our shortcomings, because there was no viable alternative out there in the world to which we were comparing ourselves. Now that people see what authoritarian populists have done to countries like Turkey or Russia, and many people are seeing what a populist like Trump is threatening to do to this country, I think there’s a chance that they will relearn the importance of our political system.

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The Atlantic: Captive Orangutans Are Curious (But Wild Ones Are Not)

He and his team at the University of Zurich have spent several years confirming that observation in dozens of individuals. They’ve shown that wild orangutans are decidedly incurious. They eschew the new. They abhor the unfamiliar. Captive orangutans couldn’t be more different. They readily explore what their wild counterparts ignore. Something about captivity, whether it’s the close contact with humans or the absence of predators, unlocks a latent capacity for curiosity. And if that happens early enough, it boosts their problem-solving abilities as adults. “This dormant potential lies there waiting to be used,” van Schaik says.

To test orangutans, one of van Schaik’s team members, Sofia Forss, built fake orangutan nests in the Sumatran canopy. She then filled them with items that the apes would never have seen before—a Swiss flag, plastic fruit, and even an orangutan doll. Footage from motion-sensitive cameras revealed that wild orangutans walked around the items for months. Only two adolescents ever actually touched the unfamiliar items. When another team member, Caroline Schuppli, repeated the same experiment in several zoos, she got completely different results. Within minutes, the orangutans had wrecked the nests. [...]

Why? In captivity, orangutans experience a safe and stable environment, without the constant distractions of hunger and predators. That gives them the time and opportunity to explore, and such explorations, far from leading to a sticky end, are actively rewarded with food and other treats. They also encounter humans, who become trusted role models in the way that the orangutans’ parents do in the wild. And humans ... we like to touch stuff. “Everything we touch becomes ... we call it ‘blessed,’” says van Schaik. “It’s labeled as explorable.” [...]

“I myself am very curious about how urbanization may be influencing the expression of curiosity in animals that are living in cities,” says Sarah Benson-Amram from the University of Wyoming. Urban animals are certainly free-living, but they often experience many of the same conditions—plentiful food, fewer predators, and abundant human role models—that captive orangutans do. Do they become curiouser and curiouser for it?

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Jacobin Magazine: Notes on Italy’s Election

This historic shift of power within the Right — the now-nationwide Lega secured four times more votes than in 2013, while Berlusconi’s party is weaker than ever — marks a further collapse of what is loosely called the “center.” Not only did Forza Italia fall behind, but Matteo Renzi’s Democrats, who hit 40 percent at the 2014 European elections, here collapsed below 20 percent. The decline of the parties who have ruled Italy since the early 1990s is notably expressed in the impossibility of forming a grand coalition, even if other liberal and center-left forces are included. Parties which achieved 70 percent of the vote in 2008 were this Sunday below 34 percent. [...]

Social atomization and disgust with politics did not create easy conditions for either. Rejection of the ruling parties has taken the form of a vote for “outsiders,” but the overall panorama is a sharp shift to the right, not least given the absolutely central role of migration and race in this campaign. Whatever the M5S’s internal dissensions, its leader has adopted an ever harsher rhetoric on this terrain. Even before he was contemplating a deal with the Lega, he denounced NGO “migrant taxis” and called for a target of “zero boats” with migrants from Africa. M5S ultimately responds to a pessimistic vision of Italian society, in which solidarity does not exist, collective ambition is impossible, and public spending is only something to be cut. [...]

The M5S is not an Italian Front National. It is not even a strongly Eurosceptic force, having abandoned this cause in the name of presenting a more “professional” and less “extreme” face. Nor does it offer some new democratic vision. Far from empowering citizens to mobilize for social change, its guru proposed a well-worn set of ideas based on removing “ideology” from the realm of state administration, in this drawing on the technocratic ideals of typewriter kingpin Adriano Olivetti. It repeats a hackneyed cry of making Italy a “normal country,” free of corruption and inefficiency, even though it has already abandoned its own anti-corruption charter.

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Politico: Silvio Berlusconi’s grand failure

“Since it was a race, the winner is [League leader Matteo] Salvini. He succeeded in bringing his party from 4 to 18 [percent], he did a great political job and turned a regional party into a national one,” said Denis Verdini, an Italian lawmaker and long-time ally of Berlusconi. He added that the League managed to win regions historically loyal to Forza Italia.  

“Unlike Berlusconi, he [Salvini] capitalized on anti-immigration and anti-EU feelings that ran strong across the country. He proved that ‘Italians first’ is not just a slogan,” Verdini said. [...]

“Berlusconi has woken up to a rather cold shower. At age 81, his unique selling point was his stated ability to rein in the League and fend off the 5Stars. He did not deliver on either count,” said Francesco Galietti, founder of political risk firm Policy Sonar. [...]

“Berlusconi’s age and his poor social media skills also played a role in his defeat. Both Salvini and the 5Star Movement used online platforms to campaign and attack opponents, and both succeeded,” D’Agostino said.

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