After Trump’s election, millions of words were typed about how ‘blue collar’ areas had turned out to vote Republican. Yet Clinton led by 11% among voters who earn less than $50,000. Trump secured his victory by winning among those who earn $50-200,000. Much the same can be said for the far right in Italy, whose core support is in the wealthier – though now de-industrialising – north, rather than in the more impoverished south; or about Brazil, where 97% of the richest areas voted for the fascist Bolsonaro, whilst 98% of the poorest neighbourhoods voted for the Workers’ Party candidate, Haddad.
We see a similar distortion in debate about Brexit. After the vote, journalists went on endless tours of deprived areas to report on how working-class people voted Leave (which many did). However, they somehow forgot to mention that wealthy counties like Wiltshire backed Brexit, while some of the poorest areas of the UK – the western parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as Liverpool and Leicester – voted Remain. Academics who studied the class breakdown of the Brexit vote found ‘the Leave vote to be associated with middle class identification and the more neutral “no class” identification. But we find no evidence of a link with working class identification.’ [...]
To put it another way: the decade since the financial crisis has accelerated the emergence of a new global oligarch class. With growing wealth has come growing power and a growing ability to shape political debate through the dominant communications technology of the era: TV and the internet. As has long happened with right-wing movements, they have done so in close collaboration with military and security networks. Because the era is neoliberalism, those networks are largely privatised, made up of mercenary firms with names like Palantir, Arcanum, SCL, AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. [...]
Cook himself lives in a semi-detached house in suburban Glasgow, which is probably worth less than the value of the donation his group gave the DUP, and appears unlikely to be the source of the cash. He denies any wrongdoing. The UK electoral regulator is supposed to know where the DUP cash comes from, and claims that it does, even if it isn’t allowed to tell us. But recent court documents have cast doubt on its confidence: its investigations seem to have amounted to asking Richard Cook where he got the money, and then believing his answers. A country doesn’t become the world centre for money laundering by employing inquisitive officials.[...]
A few years after Thiel founded Palantir, he wrote a now-notorious essay in which he argued that the extension of the franchise to women has ‘rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron’ and therefore that his fellow libertarians must focus on developing the technology that will ensure that it is capitalism, rather than democracy, which wins the struggle: ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’
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