openDemocracy: Over the worst in Europe: the 2010s have not ended like the 1930s

There are only two known ways to bring together diverse countries into one political unit. One is from above – empire-building. The other is from below, via the mechanisms of democracy, leading to the birth of entities such as the USA. The European Union tried to find a third way, avoiding both empire and democracy: achieving union by technocratic imperative.

With the demos thus effectively shut out and with no Emperor to exercise oversight, the experts took it upon themselves to move political integration along, bereft of effective control and accountability. With the marketplace seen as the default mode of all human activity, it was decided to start political integration with the introduction of a single currency, the euro. The rest, it was assumed, would follow in due course, given that people are only interested in market outcomes, rather than in participating in the politics of “Brussels”. [...]

We know now something that was not generally known (but should have been) even ten years ago: when governments place the common good in the care of “independent agencies”, thus divorcing decision-making from democratic oversight, the common good gets hijacked by special interests. In the end, in spite of being shut out from the decision-making, it is the demos who pay the price. This is what happened to the demos of Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s. In both crises, the culprits bought themselves yachts; the ordinary people got saddled with record public debt.[4] [...]

Identity politics does away with this kind of individual, closing human beings into cages of group “identities”. The French thinker Raphael Glucksman has rather cleverly translated such identities as “groups of origin”: “communautes d’origine, de foi, de couleur, de peau”.[9] You cannot escape from the tribe you were born into; and everything you think, say or do is an expression of that tribe’s identity. If you try, as an autonomous individual, to escape from the tribe, by for example making the necessary efforts and sacrifices to get a good education, then you are not congratulated for achievement; you are denounced for having acquired a privilege.[10]

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Jacobin Magazine: Syriza’s Failure Has Hurt Us All

Added to this, a closer analysis shows that the Syriza electorate in 2019 in fact bears little relation with the voters who first put it in government in 2015. Admittedly, given the lack of any credible alternative on the Left (in the broadest sense) of the political spectrum, it has not collapsed entirely. That’s the big difference with what happened to Pasok in 2012, after its own implementation of austerity measures. [...]

In generational terms, it has lost nearly half its support among younger voters (17 to 24 year-olds) but has shed only 4 percent backing among the over 65s. From an electorate polarized around wage-earners and the youth, it is now a party with a nearly uniform average score among most social strata and age classes (around 20 percent) and is ahead of New Democracy only among the unemployed. The “qualitative” profile of its electorate has undergone an even more dramatic change. A look at the choice Syriza voters made among its candidates for the European Parliament is instructive in this regard. [...]

Syriza’s electorate today looks less like the popular base of a left-wing party than the “de-ideologized” clientelist support of a party of government. It is moreover obvious that it is in part the heir to the “social-liberal” Pasok of the 2000s. Syriza came first in just four constituencies nationally, and of these, three were among PASOK’s historic symbolic bastions: two in Crete and one in the northwestern Peloponnese, around the city of Patras, cradle of that party’s long-dominant Papandreou family.

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Jacobin Magazine: Can Anyone Save the SPD?

But what comes next? The contradiction that broke Nahles — the need to renew the SPD while simultaneously governing with the conservative CDU — remains as urgent as ever. And this also means that no one is particularly keen to occupy the newly vacated leadership spots. In the immediate term, the party will be led by a three-person commission consisting of Malu Dreyer, minister-president of Rhineland-Palatinate, Manuela Schwesig, minister-president of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, outgoing SPD parliamentary speaker in Hesse. All three emphasize that their appointment is temporary. Finance minister Olaf Scholz also turned down the job, and the party’s uppermost layers continue to grow noticeably thinner. [...]

In an awkward attempt to seem more “authentic,” Barley bravely campaigned across the country in a blue hoodie adorned with the stars of the European Union. But hardly anyone fell for her calculated, plastic European hype and nor did anyone believe the promises about climate protection and turning the EU into a “social union.” Ultimately, most voters interested in such motifs ended up voting for the Greens instead. Barley was forced to defend the SPD’s policy in favor of so-called “upload filters” — accused of driving online censorship — even though she was on record opposing the law. This decision cost the party the youth vote, with exit polls last month indicating that only 10 percent of first-time voters opted for the SPD. [...]

For years now, the SPD’s image has been characterized by a toxic mixture of cowardice and being utterly overwhelmed by events. Thus, any break with the status quo would have to be of a three-fold nature: a leadership change, a political shift, and a cultural transformation. Is the party still a locomotive into the future, or a co-manager of the existing order? Can it withstand competitive internal elections and tensions, will it find the words to talk about its historic decline and the courage for a new beginning? [...]

Regardless of who emerges victorious from its internal power struggle, the SPD can no longer afford to sidestep the question of the welfare state in the twenty-first century. The same is true of the need for a sober analysis of the party’s spending and redistribution policies both in Germany and the EU as a whole. A sustainable, left-wing industrial policy — thus far no party celebrity has been willing to use those three magic words, “Green New Deal” — could point the way towards a new, progressive program. The party would then have to use that program to compete with Die Linke and the Greens, while at the same time revolutionizing itself from within.

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openDemocracy: Polish opposition united to beat populists in Euro elections – and failed

PiS’s increased their vote by more than 13%, gaining 45% of the total vote. Meanwhile, the opposition coalition, KE, only won 38% of the vote, a decrease of more than 10 points compared to the 2014 EU elections. This victory for PiS is even more impressive due to the fact that the turnout in these elections was two times higher than in 2014 (rising from 23% to 45%). There has therefore been a huge growth in the number of citizens participating in the democratic process during PiS’s term, with the largest proportion of these new votes going to the ruling party. [...]

The incoherence of KE’s political campaign and message was particularly evident in the countryside. PiS essentially won these elections in the countryside and small towns where it won 56% and 36% of the vote (in contrast it only gained 27% in cities with a population of more than 500,000). Its main political rival in the rural regions, the PSL, was neutralised and its electorate demobilised partly due to its participation in KE. This left the field open to PiS, allowing it to advance its aim of becoming the recognised leading party in rural areas. [...]

Although, it may seem to many liberal politicians and academics that the major issue facing Poland is the threat to its liberal democratic system, this view is not necessarily shared by the majority of the population. Campaigning on issues like the independence of the judiciary or Poland’s relationship with the EU are not sufficient to defeat PiS. The European elections have shown that such a strategy has actually shrunk the vote of the opposition and strengthened the position of PiS. In order to efficiently challenge the monopoly of PiS, the opposition must actually divide into different blocs and parties. Rural and leftwing parties must fight PiS on socio-economic issues to pushback against the expansion of the conservative and nationalist right into those layers of society disillusioned by neoliberal centre-right parties. And the left urgently needs to consolidate itself into a single organisation, distant from the centre, to offer a real positive alternative to the current administration.

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The New Yorker: The Persistent Ghost of Ayn Rand, the Forebear of Zombie Neoliberalism

Rand’s novels promised to liberate the reader from everything that he had been taught was right and good. She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious, physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were. Duggan calls the mood of the books “optimistic cruelty.” They are mean, and they have a happy ending—that is, the superior beings are happy in the end. The novels reverse morality. In them, there is no duty to God or one’s fellow-man, only to self. Sex is plentiful, free of consequence, and rough. Money and other good things come to those who take them. Rand’s plots legitimize the worst effects of capitalism, creating what Duggan calls “a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.”

Duggan traces Rand’s influence, both direct and indirect, on American politics and culture. Rand’s fiction was a vehicle for her philosophy, known as Objectivism, which consecrated an extreme form of laissez-faire capitalism and what she called “rational egoism,” or the moral and logical duty of following one’s own self-interest. Later in life, Rand promoted Objectivism through nonfiction books, articles, lectures, and courses offered through an institute that she established, called the Foundation for the New Intellectual. She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who helped shape neoliberal thinking. When Rand was actively publishing fiction—from the nineteen-thirties until 1957, when “Atlas Shrugged” came out—hers was a marginal political perspective. Critics panned her novels, which gained their immense popularity gradually, by word of mouth. Mid-century American political culture was dominated by New Deal thinking, which prized everything that Rand despised: the welfare state, empathy, interdependence. By the nineteen-eighties, however, neoliberal thinking had come to dominate politics. The economist Alan Greenspan, for example, was a disciple of Rand’s who brought her philosophy to his role as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford and, from 1987 until 2006, as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. [...]

The collapse of the subprime-mortgage market and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 should have brought about the death of neoliberalism by making plain the human cost of deregulation and privatization; instead, writes Duggan, “zombie neoliberalism” is now stalking the land. And, of course, the spirit of Ayn Rand haunts the White House. Many of Donald Trump’s associates, including the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, have paid homage to her ideas, and the President himself has praised her novel “The Fountainhead.” (Trump apparently identifies with its architect hero, Howard Roark, who blows up a housing project he has designed for being insufficiently perfect.) Their version of Randism is stripped of all the elements that might account for my inability to throw out those books: the pretense of intellectualism, the militant atheism, and the explicit advocacy of sexual freedom. From all that Rand offered, these men have taken only the worst: the cruelty. They are not even optimistic. They are just plain mean.

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Vox: There’s a new meatless Beyond Burger. It tastes even more like meat.

It’s been a good few years for Beyond Meat. National chains including Del Taco, Carl’s Jr., and TGI Friday’s have started carrying their products. They’ve also found their way onto grocery store shelves at Whole Foods, Kroger, and Target. In total, Beyond Meat says its products are available in more than 35,000 outlets, from hotels and college campuses to grocery stores and sports stadiums. Sales have been growing fast — last year, the company reported revenues of $87.9 million, up from $32.6 million in 2017. [...]

There’s a lot wrong with our food system. Producing meat by raising animals on factory farms produces tons of greenhouse gases, and many analysts think we can’t tackle climate change without tackling the enormous emissions that go into agriculture. Animals in close quarters are fed low-dose antibiotics constantly so they don’t make one another sick, which contributes to antibiotic resistance, a huge threat on the horizon for public health. And animals on factory farms are routinely subjected to intense cruelty and conditions that disgust the average American consumer. [...]

New breakthroughs in food science have made it easier to imitate the flavor and texture of real meat. While early veggie burgers were almost exclusively purchased by vegetarians, Brown says that 93 percent of Beyond Meat customers buy regular meat too, suggesting the company has succeeded at making something that appeals to meat eaters.

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Vox: Botswana decriminalizes homosexuality in a victory for LGBTQ rights in Africa

The decision reflects the attitudes of many in the country. Last December, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi showed his support for decriminalizing homosexuality. “Many people of same-sex relationships in this country ... have been violated and have also suffered in silence for fear of being discriminated,” he said. ”Just like other citizens, they deserve to have their rights protected.”

And a 2016 study by Afrobarometer showed that 43 percent of people in Botswana were not opposed to having LGBTQ neighbors. They were likely among those in the packed courthouse who cheered the decision. [...]

The 2016 Afrobarometer study shows the average acceptance rate for living next to gay individuals on the continent is just 21 percent, an abysmally low number. The chart below indicates that Cape Verde leads the way with 74 percent, while Senegal only has a 3 percent acceptance rate.

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The Guardian: Canada will ban 'harmful' single-use plastics as early as 2021

Trudeau said his government is drawing inspiration from the European parliament, which voted overwhelmingly in March to impose a wide-ranging ban on single-use plastics to counter pollution from discarded items that end up in waterways and fields. Legislatures of the EU member states must vote on the measure before it takes effect.

Trudeau announced the move from the banks of a lake in Gault nature reserve in Quebec less than five months before a national election in which climate change and pollution are among the top campaign issues. [...]

Less than 10% of plastic used in Canada gets recycled. The government said that 1m birds and over 100,000 sea mammals worldwide are injured or die each year when they mistake plastic for food or become entangled.

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PBS: LGBTQ Catholics denounce Vatican’s document on gender identity

The document, published during LGBT Pride Month, was immediately denounced by LGBT Catholics as contributing to bigotry and violence against gay and transgender people. Advocacy group New Ways Ministry said it would further confuse individuals questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation and at risk of self-harm. [...]

It called for a “path of dialogue” and listening on the issue of “gender theory” in education. But even priestly advocates for LGBT Catholics noted that the text appeared to have relied entirely on previous papal pronouncements, Vatican documents and philosophers and theologians. [...]

It called gender fluidity a symptom of the “confused concept of freedom” and “momentary desires” that characterize post-modern culture. It rejected terms such as “intersex” and “transgender” and said the purpose of the biological “complementarity” of the male and female sex organs was to ensure procreation.

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