Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

true, but it draws parallels to corresponding trends elsewhere

The list includes Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, all of whom have abandoned most pretenses that they rule according to the people’s will.

an awful lot of "dictators" have claimed a mandate based on the will of the people, especially from the 19th century onwards

Rousseau doesn't advocate representative democracy iirc

i just think it's important to note that w/ some of these guys we're talking about widely popular cults of personality. sometimes from the vantage point of the west we forget that there is more than one path to legitimacy and just bc it's not democratic does not mean that it's in defiance of the popular will.

Not disagreeing per se, but is there some kind of objective measure for 'the people's will to rule' in undemocratic democracies?

xp

i agree, that's why i was saying there's a history behind this - a history that goes a very long way back if you think of the tensions in the ancient Roman polity and how people like Julius Caesar manipulated popular support without belonging to a democracy

I mean, propaganda is a helluva drug precisely because it instills the notion that it's in your best interest to conform, regardless of whether you buy into it or not.

xp

and the measures for "people's will" are frequently contested even within representative democracies. the UK's Brexit referendum being a current shining example, with pol's queueing up to claim that only their path represents the electorate's choice

saw this today: https://www.axios.com/china-leads-the-world-in-optimism-1513304665-e04fa0d2-8837-4604-957d-aeb6d779458d.html

Erdogan isn't that popular

I'm also reminded of this quote from Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Sarkozy has some thoughts:

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/sarkozy-praises-uae-s-leadership-model-1.709755

“Where you see a great leader, there is no populism,” said Mr Sarkozy, who was president of France from 2007 to 2012. “Where is the populism in China? Where is the populism here? Where is the populism in Russia? Where is the populism in Saudi Arabia? If the great leadership leaves the table, the populist leaders come and replace him.”

Modern democracy “destroys” leaderships, he said, noting some of the world’s greatest leaders today come largely from undemocratic governments.

“How could we have a democracy and at the same time accept leadership?” Mr Sarkozy asked the audience. “How can we have a vision that could look into 10, 15, 20 years and at the same time have an election rhythm in the States, for instance, every four years? The great leaders of the world come from countries that are not great democracies.”

great take, nick

The Italian election is worrisome

quel républicain

Sarkozy otm

Even the French ppl I know who tend right hate Sarkozy.

His assessment of the crisis in representative democracy is correct, his worship of "benign" dictatorship infects most of his political chums anyway if they were only honest

Fuxk a leader, obv

i can so imagine Blair saying the same thing word for word

^^ frothing at the mouth

Putin is a shit-stirring bread & circuses populist all up and down the line.

The “leadership crisis” in western representative democracies appears to driven pretty strongly by the divisive inclinations of News Corp tentacles and their ilk, making basic governance into a zero sum game between conservative and liberal coalitions that can barely stand their own kind much less each other.

Sarkozy's comments are representative of a pretty common fear that democracy has ceased to be the most efficient way to run a country. It's probably the logical conclusion of the theory that you need to run nations like you run businesses - you're constantly in competition with everyone else, you need a grand top-down vision of where you want to be in 10 years, along with the stability to deliver it, and the player with the lowest barrier to rapid action has the greatest advantage. I'm not sure that's going to change until the China growth model runs off the rails, if it ever does.

It will. And if it won't, the populace will at some point demand more influence.

If the quality of live continues to improve relative to democratic countries, is that a given?

*life

most revolutions start with a burgeoning but relatively small middle class tbf

not that i'm saying this will happen but, it's rarely a purely "standards of living" thing?

democracy is often a luxury abstract value for the spare-time-having bourgies to get worked up about rather than the rest of us

That has certainly been true historically but idk whether the combined efforts of post-Soviet collapse, Singapore-style autocratic luxury and the ongoing malaise in Western democracy have changed things.

yeah agree the past isn't a reliable predictor here

plus size of the country, differences in political/philosophical/religious traditions etc

This is tangentially relevant:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-singular-pursuit-of-comrade-bezos-3e280baa045c

Amazon as centrally-planned economy and the division between ‘efficient ‘ and ‘good’.

The comparison is irresistible

Trying to make sense of the Italian election, and the Five Star Movement is just as confusing to me as ever. Do they really belong being lumped in with the anti-immigrant/anti-EU parties, or are they something different? They have a strong green platform iirc.

Every country is different, but that is also why I'd put China in more danger of upheaval than Russia/KSA/etc. Chinas development has been based on industrialization and having low wages, and there's a limit as to how much that can continue to improve peoples lifes. Once the wages become to high, the factories disappear, and the infrastructure projects that make up for it are becoming more and more ludicrous. It's not as with Russia, where Gazprom money seems able to both finance a kleptocracy and a rising living standard. Those kind of countries don't seem to go full Venezuela unless they're completely mismanaged.

yeah, we keep waiting for resource extraction economies to shit the bed and they never do

however as a dude once said two hours ago the past isn't a reliable predictor here

and a rising living standard.

citation needed

http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally-planned to a market-based economy and has experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 percent a year—the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history—and has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty.

you can argue about whether or not it's really an improvement to start as an impoverished farmer and then "rise" to a factory worker with 16+ hour shifts making consumer electronics in unsafe conditions. but the textbook "rising living standards" in china, measured by overall GDP and GDP per capita, aren't up for dispute.

think Dan meant re: Russia.

Living standards in Russia tanked after the end of the Soviet Union and have substantially increased over the last ten or twelve years, though have plateaued a bit recently.

oh, my bad, sorry dan!

the chart i was about to post is still relevant, though:

https://i.imgur.com/GDEVQlz.png

i can't bear to post a GDP chart without grimacing, though. hey everyone in the US, wasn't it great how we all doubled our GDP from 1995 until now? we're all doing twice as well as 1995, right??

but it does suggest that perhaps living standards in russia are not quite as stable as some are suggesting.

The 2014 / 2015 rouble devaluation affects USD charts hugely. It doesn’t mean irl domestic spending has been affected so dramatically.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/austrian-state-may-limit-kosher-meat-sales-to-registered-jews-1.6289229

this beggars belief

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/sep/09/sweden-election-live

Fingers crossed!

Having to cross fingers at all is depressing enough.

can't believe there are fascists in Sweden

There's always been a lot of fascists in Sweden.