Democracy is supposed to be rule by the populous afterall, right? But it offends the Western tradition of individualism by thinking in group terms. Watch the video and read more in the article by Tim Kirby.

There are countless alarmist articles from the past rotting away on the forgotten side of the internet, warning us that “this time it’ll be different” and that the given crisis of the moment was “the one” that would lead to big change. Flawed humans are often too eager to over inflate information that suits them to build the exciting revolutionary narrative of their fantasies. We should always be wary of falling into the trap of this alarmism, but as 2020 comes to an end there are some truly unique events happening in the West, especially America that cannot be ignored. The Covid-19 Pandemic, or should I say governments’ strange measures to fight it, have eroded one of the major pillars of Western stability, that is rarely acknowledged. Life in the West is finally becoming uncomfortable and whether this is “good news” is up for debate, but it is certainly good for creating major political change.

The most unseen form of repression is perhaps the most effective

If we look at the late 20th and now the 21st century it is critical to acknowledge that the main means of coercion of the population of a given nation is comfort. Throughout all of human history from the point when we first started to slap together farm implements there has had to be some form of repression/coercion to keep the system, that we call society, on its feet. The serfs needed to toil, the knights needed to defend, the traders to trade and the elite to oversee it all. This is one of the paradoxes of Democracy, we created a system that tells us the people are in charge and free to do whatever they want when in reality society exists as it does, exactly because people cannot do what they want and do not have the power to topple the system.

Fancy textbooks call the willingness of individuals to submit to society “coercion”. Traditionally we, not surprisingly, think of this coercion in the most blunt and obvious form that is easy to understand – the police. In most nations there is an army for external threats, but the police have the same hierarchy of ranks, fancy uniforms and weapons only their enemy is you. The good news is they don’t want to kill you, just coerce you into enough obedience for society to function. After the truncheon club, many point the finger at religion or media as the great repressor. Many of our views and opinions are formed for us by these two factors and it cannot be denied that they shape our way of thinking, which can and does create coercion. Comfort though is usually not mentioned anywhere despite it being probably the most powerful form of repression we have ever seen, but this is not surprising.

Again, this isn’t to say that coercion/repression is a great evil. Without it, the complex societies that give us many benefits, could not stand and none of us wants to go live in a cave. And it is exactly this fact, that very few people are willing to go “live off the land”, that gives comfort so much power as a means of control. The overall global migration trend is for those with less to try to force themselves into countries with more, thus increasing their level of comfort. The migrants may not put it in these terms, but humans like all of God’s creatures tend to take the easy way out. Racoons prefer to attack the dumpster behind McDonald’s for food because it can’t fight back and is always available. This probably has a horrible effect on the racoons’ health but it is the most comfortable option. They become very dependent on the dumpster and would probably shriek in terror if the fast food “restaurant” was ever to be closed down forcing them to go back to dealing with food that can run/squirm away. And this sort of situation is what has happened in the decadent West.

Image: Homeless camps on the West Coast of the United States are a symbol of the decline of comfort.

We have watched the glorious triumphant pith-helmeted European transform from heroic and rock solid at the beginning of the 20th century into a pathetic rotting farce of himself by the dawn of the new millennium. The West is dying out demographically, the ethics and morals of Christianity are gone, the amount of debt has gone beyond the event horizon, and it would seem the average person of European descent has nothing left to look forward to other than pills, booze, marijuana and saving up for a PS5. This is not a shocking revelation, millions of people see this happening, but why is nothing done about it? Again we have to look back to comfort – the West has lived too well for too long after the final shots of WWII.

When you have a lot to lose like a comfortable home, stable income, and the lower two tiers of Maslow’s Pyramid, plus a lifestyle that the kings of old could only dream of, it is only natural to not want to risk losing it all.

The fear of national debt, migrant crisis, degradation of morals, etc. seem just far enough in the future that it is never worth risking the comfortable present. But now the Covid-19 pandemic has eaten away at the West’s level of comfort so much that we can only now expect to see big changes happening in the Enlightenment nations. Once the pleasant mainstream bourgeois lifestyle becomes impossible to live anything could be on the table.

Covid-19 Measures have trounced on comfort levels

The Pandemic has caused “major economic shock” to small businesses in America as various shutdowns and quarantines brought the most havoc “on the little guy” while leaving big Walmart, Amazon and other major players open for business. This advantage for certain international giants has really boosted their profits during a crisis. This is not due to their brilliant efforts but the squeeze put on all the smaller competitors.

This “transfer of wealth” may have finally tipped the scales enough for the amount of Westerners who “have little/nothing to lose” to reach critical mass. Protests against Covid-19 measures, which the Mainstream Media seems unable to manipulate at present, are becoming ever more frequent, and most notably, ever more populist. The protests also have a lot of overlap with the #StopTheSteal and Yellow Vest movements. With Americans frustrated and impoverished by Covid-19 measures, while at the same time there is a battle for power over a blatantly rigged 2020 U.S. presidential election, it looks as though the powder keg is dry, primed and awaiting a final spark.

Image: visions of the future with less environmental impact look very uncomfortable indeed.

The main issue is for recent history is that, as stated above, comfort has worked as a means of keeping people the world over but most specifically in the West coerced into going along with the status quo. Now, however, in the face of “The Great Reset” it seems like the elite have lost their playbook. Comfort is decreasing and promises of a “fourth industrial revolution” that doesn’t seem too promising for the common man, is not exactly going to woo the masses.

Comfort and Communism

We saw that the role of comfort in coercion was very powerful when the Supreme Court gave Bush the Presidency over Gore. Many people at the time felt that this was criminal, the end of Democracy, and cause for revolution. Some people carried some signs around and went home. When the government just outright slaughtered the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas there were similar feelings that this crime against the people would be punished by revolution. The same goes for the various riots in L.A. and Ferguson. But ultimately no one did anything. Fundamental injustices will always be tolerated because for most people comfort is vastly more important than justice or other moral ideals. Part of the reason the Soviet Union lost the Cold War is that simply the Communist elite wanted the West’s level of comfort. “Blue jeans and sausage” proved much more powerful than righteous Marxist positions. Outside of the Soviet Higherups, the masses in Communist nations could see on TV screens that elsewhere there is more stuff and people live “better”. In America historians delude themselves that the Warsaw Pact wanted American freedom, when they actually wanted American stuff. The real race in the Cold War could have been for the highest level of comfort for the masses.

In conclusion

Image: Donald Trump says he is going to “fight” to right the wrongs of the election. Perhaps this may become a very literal fight.

But now we are in a unique moment in history where there is not only a blatantly stolen American election, populist movements rising in the West, public outrage over Covid-19 measures and government incompetence. But more importantly life is becoming finally uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that for many they are starting to have nothing to lose which is exactly what populist politicians need to make the change necessary to keep the West alive.

One of the main reasons the Silent Majority sits at home while radicals mutant Western society is comfort. Now that things are not very cozy the Silent Majority is very likely to get much louder in 2021.

A highly functional society needs enough comfort to create stability, but enough discomfort to keep the population a bit agitated and able to take risks.

Many today feel the void, a sense impending change. The Coronavirus has made us acutely aware of the fissures that are manifest in all aspects of our societies. A sense that the post-war era – perhaps even, the European Enlightenment moment itself – has run its course; that the latter somehow has failed us. Some passionately – even a tad hysterically – wish to extend the familiar present: to keep America’s founding values. But many more are disaffected. They want our present to be radically changed (or even smashed) – but all wonder what may come next.

What is already clear is that there can be no ‘return to normal’. That is no longer available. On the table are truly explosive proposals for either a material tech utopia (i.e. ‘The Great Reset’); or, from the wokes, an Gramsci-style, bottom-up cultural insurgency to overthrow the world. (This latter is not really an option on the immediate table). Others seem readier to take arms (at least in America), against both notions, in pursuit of Trump’s ‘golden age’ virtues and identity: a struggle to preserve traditional Protestant ethics.

Today, certain western élites are trying to implement a ‘braking action’ to this cascade of ‘disorders’ that are emerging from popular discontent and structural breakdown. These disorders, they fear, fuel populism and nationalist sentiment, and therefore threaten the sustainability of their central ‘myth’ – the notion of a global humanity grounded in common ‘values’, pursuing an itinerary towards a tech-led, global order and governance.

They see risk. They can observe that ‘other’ values, opposed to universalism, are arising from deep layers of human experience and history. These are being perfunctorily dismissed by the Establishment as ‘populism’. But, under the palimpsest of populism, we also are witnessing old, eternal values, returning in a new, fecund form.

Most of today’s ‘discontented’ will be oblivious to the history to the values they espouse, and may never seriously address the deeper layers of thinking in which they inhere. But that is not the point – seeds are being set into our collective psyche.

What makes the choice of path such a source of tension is that we are being told repeatedly that two paths are radically dissimilar – even at war with each other; whereas effectively, they share certain essential characteristics. They have a similar end-point. There is little or no choice at all, except in terms of the political illusion into which each path has been folded.

Both paths are grounded in a consensus expressed most clearly by the World Economic Forum, which ‘Davos’ chair, Klaus Schwab, has described as The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR):

“The first revolution, which began in the 1700s, used water and steam power to mechanise production. The second, between the 1800s and the First World War, progressed to electric power to create the mass production of goods. The third used electronics and information technology to begin the process of automating production. The fourth revolution seeks to build on the third, and is dubbed as a ‘digital revolution’.

Schwab describes this as a ‘fusion of technologies’ that embodies the physical, digital and biological spheres. Technological breakthroughs will include fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy storage and quantum computing…”.

The world, Schwab says, can expect the revolution to be a symbiosis between micro-organisms, the human body, the products people consume, and the buildings we inhabit. Human ‘future’ thus is set to converge with both the digital and biological worlds – and to become part of it, the Davos Strategic Intelligence Platform foretells. This is very serious ‘stuff’ – an attempt to blur the frontier between robot and human, just as that separating male and female has been turned opaque.

If 4IR enjoys a certain acceptance across western élites (including within Team Trump), what separates the latter from the true globalists are the add-ons: In 2014, Christine Lagarde (then IMF head) called for a ‘reset’ of monetary policy (in the face of “bubbles growing here and there”); the financial sector regulatory environment, and structural reforms of global economies to deal with stagnant growth and unemployment. The following year, the UN laid out Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Accord was launched. And in 2016 the WEF ran with the 4IR narrative (setting up expert platforms to take the project forward). Then in June this year, WEF launched The Great Reset.

In short, the ‘house of the new world order’ was being built from the bottom up, to accomplish an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, rather than through frontal attack (just as the CFR journal had advocated as far back as 1974). It is this end run around national sovereignty – America’s especially – that sticks in Trump and his supporters’ claw.

With global unemployment spiking as a result of the Corononavirus lockdowns, and with the U.S. in full spate ‘Cultural Revolution’, the globalists have seized the moment: The 4IR fusion of technologies, together with the climate and monetary ‘complementary Resets’, were launched as last month’s Great Reset.

Even the EU (Covid) Recovery Fund accord settled last week is very much a part with The Reset blueprint (as Ambrose Pritchard-Evans has noted):

“The significance is political. The fund is a profound change in the structure and character of the European Project. The Commission will have powers to raise large funds on the capital markets for the first time, and to direct how the spending is allocated, turning this strange hybrid creature into an even more extraordinary institution.

“Where else in the world does a single unelected body have the “right of initiative” on legislation, and the executive powers of a proto-government, and the spending prerogatives of a parliament, all wrapped in one?

“It is Caesaropapist, bordering on totalitarian in constitutional terms, mostly unchecked by meaningful parliamentary oversight … [and it fits with] one consistent theme in the countless summits that I covered as Brussels correspondent. They always nudged forward the Monnet agenda by means of creepage, precedent, and the establishment of facts on the ground. The democratic consent for this erosion of sovereign national control was thinner than EU enthusiasts ever cared to admit”.

Yes, yet wholly in line with Davos thinking (Chair, Schwab again): “Businesses will have no alternative but to adapt … Governments, too, must transform. Whilst they may acquire new technological powers to ‘increase their control over populations’ (in the shape of surveillance systems and digital infrastructure control), they will also have to keep up with the pace of technological change”. It will disrupt everything. Huge social tensions will result. Nevertheless, “Ready or not”, Schwab warns, “a new world is upon us”.

According to Schwab, 4IR will ‘lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term corporate gains in efficiency and productivity’. The cost of doing business will recede. Yes, there might be fewer CEO oligarchs (resulting from consolidation), but those who remain incontrovertibly will be the new ‘Elect’, managing the world through their digital and AI tools.

But what will Europe or the U.S. do with the 20% or 40% of the workforce that will no longer be required (or who prove to be technologically inadequate) in this new, robotic world? No problem, Schwab responds: the redundant workforce will be given ‘their safety net’. (i.e. universal basic income).

So, back to the issue posed of this ‘fork in the road’ being essentially no true bifurcation? Well, on the one hand, the very enablers of the cultural war in the U.S., (i.e. U.S. Big Philanthropy; Big Tech and Big Silicon Valley), are, at the same time, enabling Davos, and the ‘Great Reset’ initiative. They are one and the same.

That is to say, those helping roil the U.S. with its cultural dismemberment, are simultaneously working to advance the EU centralisation project (which would, they expect, ultimately repress the woke revolution through big data social-credit, and digital currency control).

This ideological shift needs to be absorbed: Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big CEOs are with the ‘woke’ and BLM militants, and helping to empower them (some of these foundations have resources that eclipse those of states). But they are also with ‘Davos’ too. It is a House divided against itself, (but whose purpose again is an end-run around Trump, and his sovereignty-ist base).

The young Woke generation have been set to cancel America’s cultural identity as they imagine it, (and as Christopher Lasch foresaw in his Revolt of the Élite, these 20/30+ year olds view American culture darkly: “A nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy”).

Why then should Big Funders and Big Business in the U.S. enable a movement that holds American founding principles in contempt?

Well, simply put: The EU is the ideal vehicle for building a new 4IR aristocratic oligarchy. Such a construct, in fact, has always been latent within the EU project, as Ambrose Pritchard–Evans noted, whereas the U.S. – as these Davos enablers imagine it – is not. U.S. legal and cultural structures are antithetical. But the corollary of such assessment is plain: Europe is destined, in this view, as the centre of western power. And the U.S. loses it.

Trump and others of the American élite, but especially the military, unreservedly accept 4IR to be the global ‘game-changer’, but are be-damned if they will permit American primacy to slip away to Europe – let alone China. Hence Trump’s ‘war’ with Merkel (i.e. over Nordstream 2), whom he probably suspects would love to be the new Emir of the West. It explains Trump’s targeting of the CCP, too.

The U.S. can do one of two things: It can attempt to leap-frog China on AI and big data, or work in co-operation with it. Apparently, Trump wants that the U.S. leap-frog China, and to present this aim as the electoral platform for November: Winning the trade war against China. But to succeed, he must disrupt both China and the EU. What if China and the EU began to collude? Geo-political primacy – in this narrative – will rest with he who controls tech standards and licensing rules, over coming decades.

The somewhat dirty little secret to this plan is that, were the U.S. to succeed in seizing the commanding heights of global Big Tech, it would still not resolve the issue of what to do with 20% of Americans automated and robotised out of their jobs. Many of these will be blue collar Trump supporters. Winning the ‘tech war’ will not bring those lost jobs back onshore. Rather the automation envisaged in 4IR will ‘cancel’ even more of them.

In sum, both the Trump and the Globalist paths both lead to soft-tech feudalism – unemployment and social controls: a Hobson’s Choice. But with Trump, his supporters hope, America would still be the world’s No. 1 and retain some Christian ethos (such as the centrality of family); but other primordial ‘liberal’ virtues such as sturdy independence, freedom and disdain for centralised government control would need be sacrificed to the hungry beast of roboticised industry. A glimpse at today’s working practices at Amazon would give a foretaste.

Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated End of History essay, “is ordinarily read as the apologia for rampant capitalism and Anglo-American interventions in the Middle East”, but that would be wrong, Gavin Jacobson notes.

Rather, Fukuyama – widely regarded as the apostle preaching the arrival of the American-led New World Order – however, did not cry out ‘Hosanna!’ to the NWO (as often assumed). On the contrary: he said that it might lead to popular revolt.

Indeed, the future, Fukuyama wrote, risked becoming a “life of masterless slavery”, a world of civic putrefaction and cultural torpor, exfoliated of all contingency and complication. “The last men” would be reduced to Homo Economicus, guided solely by the rituals of consumption, and shorn of the animating virtues and heroic drives that propelled history forward”.

Fukuyama warned that people would either accept this state of affairs, or more likely, would revolt against the tedium of their own existence. Previous ‘Grand Visions’ (such as Soviet industialisation) mostly have ended badly.

We happen to know some details about initiation among ancient Greeks, particularly among the Greeks in southern Italy. And perhaps the most famous detail is that, after the initiates had made their journey into the underworld, they were confronted with a choice between two paths. To be more precise, they arrived at the famous fork in the road, where a major decision was waiting to be made as to which way to go.

One of them, is the path that only the initiate (who now, is ‘aware’) is able to follow: that leads to Life – real life. The other is the path to forgetfulness – of a descent towards sleep and ultimately to torpor, as one of the ‘walking dead’.

Knowledge about these paths customarily was maintained as a mystery. The details were hidden in the riddles of initiation. But these latter were all intended to hint to initiates at a reality very different from the one they took for granted. And the clue to ‘that’ at which the ancients were hinting, lies with a path leading to life, rather than one compelling us to hunt after some illusory ‘realness’ – whether it is the compelling myth of endless, debt-led prosperity, or some Orwellian universal techno-future. Both artifice are powerful, in their own way.

It is not however a matter of which artifice is more, or less close, to real, than any other. The point is: you cannot approach, cannot get to, the real in this way. It is no ‘path’. These are just two illusions; two illusory ‘reals’, amongst many. There is no Schwabian – ‘ready or not’, ‘new world’ about to descend upon us. Just, maybe a different way of being human, amidst digital tools.

The ‘other path’ – a path less mentioned – is a return to simplicity. And to finding an inner ‘sovereignty’.

One thing about U.S. President Donald Trump is that he can be brutally frank. Trump recently picked up the phone and called British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to convey his displeasure over the latter’s decision to allow Huawei to operate in the United Kingdom despite Washington’s repeated urgings not to do business with the Chinese tech company.

Washington even threatened that London would be expelled from the Five Eyes (intelligence-sharing arrangement between the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) if it had anything to do with 5G developed by the Chinese company.

But Johnson stuck to his guns—rightly so, since the post-Brexit British economy hopes to get substantial blood transfusion from China to sustain its future growth and prosperity.

After a “furious” call from Trump, which ended abruptly when the U.S. president “slammed down the phone,” Johnson has since postponed his planned visit next month to Washington.

Therefore, Trump’s frank remarks about his forthcoming India visit on February 24-25 to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, should not come as a surprise. In response to a query from the media, he said on February 18:

“Well, we can have a trade deal with India, but I’m really saving the big deal for later on. We’re doing a very big trade deal with India. We’ll have it. I don’t know if it’ll be done before the election, but we’ll have a very big trade deal with India.

“We’re not treated very well by India, but I happen to like Prime Minister Modi a lot. And he told me we’ll have 7 million people between the airport and the event. And the stadium, I understand, is sort of semi under construction, but it’s going to be the largest stadium in the world. So it’s going to be very exciting. But he says between the stadium and the airport, we’ll have about 7 million people. So it’s going to be very exciting. I hope you all enjoy it.”

There is virtual certainty now that Trump won’t cancel the visit, as he’s wont to doing at the last minute if his attention wanders away to something more exciting.

Prime Minister Modi did a smart thing indeed by enticing Trump with the alluring prospect of 7 million people lining up the streets from the Ahmedabad airport to the newly built Motera Stadium in the city.

What can be more seductive to lure a populist politician than a mass rally? Modi understands Trump well like few people can.

Trump treats politics like a reality show. He is the very antithesis of a cerebral, erudite politician. Ideas don’t matter; words and showmanship are all that matter to him.

Trump derides intellectuality, has a flair for fake news, speaks untruths freely (even in his State of the Union speech), and is a living example of what Abraham Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

But how come such a hugely successful businessman like Trump can be so naive as to believe that Modi will produce a human chain of 7 million Gujaratis?

Some Indian analysts estimate that something like 300,000 Gujaratis might actually line up to witness the nearly 14-mile-long Trump-Modi roadshow on February 24 from the airport to Motera Stadium.

Trump would have calculated that even if just about 10 percent of the people Modi promised actually show up for the roadshow, that would present a breathtaking image to be broadcast back to American TVs.

The overpowering impression that the spectacle would create in the American public will be that Trump is an immensely popular leader among mankind, contrary to how half of Americans speak of him.

To be sure, the Modi government is leaving no stone unturned. The government hopes to arrange 120,000 people to attend the rally at Motera Stadium. Three thousand buses will be deployed to ferry people from the districts to the stadium.

The state government is expected to spend nearly US$15 million on road renovation, security cover, cultural shows, decorations, etc., alone to give a fresh look to the Gujarat model of development.

Trump didn’t waffle on the reason why he is coming. He hinted that a trade deal remains elusive. His remarks also belied some annoyance with Delhi—presumably, for not being more helpful for his America First project or his family’s business interests in India.

But then, he happens to like Modi himself “a lot.” Suffice it to say, this visit needs to be seen as a favor he’s doing for Modi, whose invitation once as chief guest on Republic Day he’d turned down.

Trump sounded like the badshah (king) out to enjoy himself on an exciting hunting trip and is looking forward to much self-gratification, all arranged at no personal cost to himself.

What can the lowly subjects expect in return? In ancient times, the badshah would have thrown gold coins at the poor people lining the streets.

counterpunch.org

In her book and article series, she described the “practical populist politician” which has tended to be adherent to business interests and personal gain during past decades vs the new breed of “technocrat” which has an enlightened non-practical (ie: Malthusian) worldview, willing to make monetary sacrifices for the “greater good”.

She further defined the “good Plutocrats” vs “bad Plutocrats”. Good Plutocrats included the likes of George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos who made their billions under the free-for-all epoch of globalization, but who were willing to adapt to the new rules of the post-globalization game. This was a game which she defined in an absurd 2013 TED Talk as a “green New Deal” of global regulation under a de-carbonized (and depopulated) green economy. For those “bad plutocrats” unwilling to play by the new rules (ie: the Trumps, Putins or any industrialist who refused to commit seppuku on the altar of Gaia), they would simply go extinct. This threat was re-packaged by Canada’s “other” globalist puppet Mark Carney, who recently said “If some companies and industries fail to adjust to this new world, they will fail to exist.”

Of course, when Freeland formulated these threats in 2011, China’s Belt and Road had not yet existed, nor had the Russia-China alliance which together are now challenging the regime-change driven world order in remarkably successful strides. The thought that nationalism could possibly make a comeback in the west was as unthinkable as the failure of free trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP.

As of November 18, 2019, Freeland has found herself cut down a notch by the “plutocrats” that she has worked so assiduously to destroy since becoming Canada’s Foreign Minister in 2017 when she ousted a Foreign Minister (Stephane Dion) who had called for a renewed cooperation with Russia on space, counter-terrorism and arctic development with Sergei Lavrov. Freeland’s unrepentant support for Ukrainian Nazis and NATO encirclement of Russia resulted in a total alienation of Russia. Her alienation of China was so successful that the Chinese government removed their ambassador in the summer of 2019. Freeland’s work in organizing the failed coup in Venezuela and supporting the MI6-Soros White Helmets in Syria became so well known that she became known as the Canadian queen of regime change.

Other pro-Chinese “bad plutocratic” companies which have been targeted for destruction under Freeland’s watch have included the beleaguered construction giant Aecon Inc. who’s board voted in favor of being sold to China in March 2018 in order to play a role in Belt and Road Projects (a decision vetoed by the Federal Government in May 2018), as well as Quebec-based SNC Lavalin which has had major deals with both Russia and China on nuclear power and major infrastructure projects and which now faces being shut down in Canada for having bribed politicians in Libya when it built Qadaffi’s Great Manmade River (destroyed by NATO in 2011).

Former Liberal Minister of Infrastructure from Shawinigan Quebec, Francois-Philippe Champagne has taken over Freeland’s portfolio and with him it appears a new pro-Eurasian policy may be emerging in Canada much more conducive to the long term survival (and strategic relevance) of Canada. This shift has already been noted by China which has responded by sending a new Ambassador to Ottawa, while a new Canadian Ambassador with a long history of working towards positive Chinese relations in the private sector (Dominic Barton) has just begun working in Beijing. Barton was the first Ambassador to China since “old guard” politician John McCallum was fired in January 2019 for defending Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou to a group of Chinese journalists.

In opposition to the cacophonic voice of Freeland, Champagne had spoken positively of China in 2017 saying “In a world of uncertainty, of unpredictability, of questioning about the rules that have been established to govern our trading relationship, Canada, and I would say China, stand out as [a] beacon of stability, predictability, a rule-based system, a very inclusive society.”

Champagne is a long-standing protégé of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and world travelled businessman who has worked in the European nuclear sector and has promoted industrial development with China for years. Jean Chretien, who campaigned for Champagne’s recent re-election, represents everything Freeland hates: A “practical” old school politician who recognizes that World War III and alienating Eurasian nations who are shaping the future is bad for business. In 2014, Chretien was given the “Friend of Russia” award and has played a major role in the private sector working with Quebec-based Power Corporation which runs the Canada-China Business Council (CCBC) and has brokered major contracts throughout China since ending his term as PM in 2003. Chretien is also the father in-law of current CCBC chair Paul Desmarais Jr. who is the heir to the PowerCorp dynasty. While these are not groups that in any way exemplify morality, they are practical industrialists who know depopulation and world war are bad for business and would prefer to adapt to a China-led BRI system over a “green technocratic dictatorship”.

Since December 2018, Chretien has attacked Freeland’s decision to support Meng Wanzhou’s extradiction to the USA, and has volunteered to lead a delegation to China in order to smooth tensions.

So while the “bad plutocrats” appear to have taken an important step forward though the debris of the recent near failure of the Liberal Party which narrowly kept a minority government after the October 21 Federal Elections, the ideologically driven technocrats led by Queen Freeland shouldn’t be discounted, as her new position as Deputy Prime Minister puts her in a position to possibly take control of Canada as 2^nd in command of a highly fragmented nation which is now hearing renewed calls for separation in Alberta, and Quebec.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The article below was first published March 21st this year. Now more than ever, with threats of rioting and violence erupting on the streets of Britain, do not think that this type of action will be a spontaneous reaction to the threat of Brexit being postponed once again. Rioting is being incited by the government. The disaster capitalists have a plan and the Trojan Horse of that plan is Brexit and it’s working. No government programme can be sustained without an apparatus of justification, so what is coming next, stoked by nationalistic incitement will be that justification.

Whilst the far-right gains traction and their anarchic voices get louder, behind the scenes, the dark forces that funds and promotes them are working to what documents reveal is a three-stage model of social change. What we are really witnessing through Brexit is the acceleration of a programme of economic regime change by a foreign state – invited in by a weakened political party who understood that their ideology of neoliberal capitalism was falling apart.

It is a sad fact of life today that white supremacist attacks now pose an increasing threat to such an extent, believe UK counter-terrorism chiefs, that terror warnings will now be issued alongside that of warnings issued to the public for Islamist and Ireland-related terror.

The problem is so serious in Britain that combating top-level far-right violence, once the responsibility of the police, will now be tackled by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5.

Given that this form of extremism is relatively new on the terror landscape, the statistics don’t look good at all. In 2017/18, of the 394 individuals who received support (and thousands don’t get as far as a referral) from the Channel program to counter potential violent extremism, 45% were referred for concerns related to Islamist extremism and 44% for concerns related to rightwing extremism. Almost one-third of actual terror-related incidents can now be notched up to far-right extremism.

Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, recorded five right-wing terror plots in 2017, all of which were in the UK.

In 2017-18, there were 7,318 direct referrals to the police and security services across the country, 1,312 of which related to the extreme right.

Since 2012-13, the number of extreme right-wing individuals receiving support has increased by almost 300 per cent, while the number of Islamist extremists has increased by 80 per cent.

Much of what we are seeing and hearing is being deliberately stoked up – but who are the main actors?

There is no doubt that whilst far-right organisations existed in years gone by, they never really had any traction in the political discourse of Britain – but they do today – and their anarchic voices are only getting louder. If anything, unless there is a very serious crackdown, the rise of the far-right will be become much more serious than it is today.

Tommy Robinson, for instance, is Britain’s most financially supported political figure. He represents the face of the far-right. Once vilified for his founding of the EDL, Robinson, to his supporters, is a bomber-jacket martyr in shades.

And yet, Tommy Robinson’s funding is known not to be just about his supporters. “The poster boy of the far-right in Britain would not be so prominent if it were not for radical free-market agitators on the extreme right in America providing support for his UK activities, which is ultimately designed to stoke up social division and tension for a specific political outcome.”

And it is here where Britain needs to be on guard to what is really happening in the background. We know for a fact that political agitators such as think tanks and the far-right have had an effect (not just on Brexit) – and we know they still are. We also know they are deliberately stoking up social division and doing so with great effect.

Whilst left-wing organisations have been fighting over political correctness for years, the far-right have bagged free-speech as their own. This is where the right-wing and Brexit makes its mark. It is not just a straight fight between the left and right as many would have you believe.

Research has identified how political extremists outside of the UK have been amplifying online pro-Leave views on Brexit, all of which, feeds into the far-right narrative of today. It fits completely in every sense. Nationalism and patriotism quite often leading to racism.

We must clear though, that by no means were all British people who voted for Brexit are these things. However, the extremities of the campaigns – the hatred, the bile, is now characterised by all that.

The research feeds into other studies and results that confirm the same thing. There is a consistent push for pro-Leave, anti-Muslim rhetoric and much of it is US-related right-wing content.

It started with a Conservative party in Britain who were losing ground to Nigel Farage’s UKIP. So they evacuated the centre ground in blind panic without giving a thought to the consequences and it led them into a dark hole. They are still there.

There is an extreme right-wing ideology espoused by what is called Vienna School. Astonishingly it has the support of several senior members of the European parliamentary group chaired by Britain’s Conservative Party. Award-winning journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed writes in depth about this in his article entitled – “The Conservative Party is incubating the racism behind New Zealand terror.” At first glance, the headline is sensationalist but the content of the article has a depressing and familiar ring about it and I would urge everyone to read it – it’s an eye-opener to the uninitiated.

“For years, the Conservative Party has knowingly courted and partnered with far-right political parties in Europe. Many of them have direct ties with the Vienna school ideology that continues to inspire far-right terrorist attacks such as the New Zealand mosque massacre. The Conservative Party chairs the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament. Two long-standing members of the Conservative’s European parliamentary group are convicted racists with affinities toward the Vienna school.”

Islamaphobia is the heart of this cancerous ideology. It cites the Islamic army conquests in Spain in the 7th century and the later Muslim invasion, which was first stopped at Vienna’s gates in 1683. It also brings in overt racism and even espouses Nazism.

Dr Ahmed’s article also shows that the Conservative Party continues to court far-right groups in Europe who openly hate both migrants and Muslims. “They are a mix of ‘neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, racist and ultra-nationalistic groups’, including a former member of the Nazi Waffen-SS.”

Britain’s Conservative party have even encouraged far-right voices from Europe and given them a stage to denounce  “globalism” and “multiculturalism” and of “Merkel, Macron, Soros” who want to “rip off Europe’s soul” by opening the doors to the “migratory invasion.” Like other far-right parties, some of these organisations want to shut down mosques, build walls, and deport immigrants en masse.

Anders Breivik the Norwegian mass murderer and Brenton Tarrant’s killing spree in New Zealand are ardent supporters of this toxic and dangerous form of thinking promoted by this Vienna School ideology.

It is difficult to accept that a British political party, one that essentially represents ‘the establishment‘ would or even could descend to this level so quickly.

America’s lapdog

The Conservative party are also dangerously aligned with America. America doesn’t have friends. It is a nation that has sycophants like Britain or the frightened as their allies. It will do anything, at any cost, to get an economic advantage and Britain is a serious target with Brexit being its facilitator.

On Wednesday 20th March, America’s extreme right-wing Conservative National Security Advisor, John Bolton – told Sky News that America is “ready to go” with a US-UK trade deal. Negotiators left the table last week and have agreed on the deal but are not formally allowed to announce it. It will inevitably be a terrible deal for Britain. This is in the backdrop of a Brexit that is politically failing in every aspect imaginable. The USA is now piling on the pressure, using not just political, but diplomatic and corporate pressures and the tools of social division to get what it wants – a hard Brexit.

Dark-money

As if that effort was not great enough – the American push is also funded by ‘dark-money.’

George Monbiot writes – “Dark money is among the greatest current threats to democracy. It means money spent below the public radar, that seeks to change political outcomes. It enables very rich people and corporations to influence politics without showing their hands.”

American billionaires developed what they call a three-stage model of social change (READ THE DOCUMENT HERE): “Universities would produce “the intellectual raw materials”. Think tanks would transform them into “a more practical or useable form”. Then “citizen activist” groups would “press for the implementation of policy change.”

All three have grown in ever greater intensity in Britain in the last few years. The link that gives it meaning is Brexit.

Just last week, the US leaders of a scandal-hit American student movement were touring the UK, following the launch of a British branch of the organisation last month. Their very existence in Britain comes from the expectation of a deregulated post-Brexit Britain.

“Advocating climate science denial, “free markets and limited government”, and with numerous links to the fossil fuel industry and Donald Trump, Turning Point claims to have a presence on more than 1,300 college campuses and high schools, engaging in “over 500,000 face-to-face conversations with college students each semester.” The scandal-hit group has been plagued by incidents of racism and allegations of illegal campaign spending since its launch.”

And today, it was revealed that an American anti-LGBT ‘hate group’ with close ties to the Trump administration has spent more than £410,000 in the UK, which opposes abortion rights, same-sex marriage equality and has publicly opposed ‘buffer zones’ around British abortion clinics. It actively supports calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to independently object to providing legal abortion services.

This list of interventions into the British way of life by American extremism is much longer than you might imagine and it is here to stay.

There are numerous reports today of front charities and so-called think-tanks not just breaking the law, which they are, but actively funding propaganda and disinformation campaigns on a range of right-wing free-market ideologies whose funding is publicly unknown. Investigations show time and time again – it is American corporations and billionaires at the heart of the problem.

They spend huge sums of money defending figures on the hard right or far right: Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, Tommy Robinson, Toby Young, Arron Banks, Brett Kavanaugh, Viktor Orban. They are portrayed as victims of “McCarthyites” trying to suppress free speech. It demands the hardest of possible Brexits, insisting that “No Deal is nothing to fear.”

They have even recently opened offices in London for ‘oppositional research‘ – a euphemism for appaling and guttural American attack-dog style politics. Its offices are inhabited only by Conservative party members. It brings the very worst of American political tactics you can imagine to our shores.

Social Change

The structure of social change, that we are experiencing – the underhand exploitation of universities, overt corruption within think tanks/charities and the funding of ‘activists’, is being brought to Britain by American billionaires. To quote a passage from their own documents:

“Many of the arguments advanced for and against investing at the various levels are valid. Each type of institute at each stage has its strengths and weaknesses. But more importantly, we see that institutions at all stages are crucial to success. While they may compete with one another for funding and often belittle each other’s roles, we view them as complementary institutions, each critical for social transformation.”

In 2008, two years before David Cameron came to power, a cable published by WikiLeaks, shows then shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague telling the US embassy that – “We want a pro-American regime. We need it.” [i] The US official noted: “Hague said whoever enters 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister soon learns of the essential nature of the relationship with America”. Hague also said that he and Tory leader David Cameron were “children of Thatcher and “staunch Atlanticists”. It was clear back then, what this meant and where Britain was heading. The green light had been given. [ii]

And so a path was set in motion.

“the Structure of Social Change model helps us to understand the distinct roles of universities, think tanks, and activist groups in the transformation of ideas into action”

This is what British people need to be worried about the most. The Brexit genie was let out of its bottle first by a failed political ideology of the Conservatives, then by paid economists and academics who wrote for the secretive think tanks who fashioned the policies that have now morphed into activism, that has translated into violence.

The structure of social change, that three model system is something we have all read about in some way. For instance, here is the first sentence of a recent article in the Guardian – and it says it all. “Muslim leaders from around the world have accused the mainstream media, politicians and academics of contributing to the conditions fuelling terrorist violence against their communities.”

That letter was penned by 350 leading Islamic figures from around the world, which links the actions of the NZ shooter, the 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, to an atmosphere of “systemic and institutionalised Islamophobia”.

In the meantime, those on the hard-right and far-right have been conned, they are merely a vehicle of travelling fools, the diversionary tactics of those with real power.

It is right to say Britain is being invaded – but not by Islamists. It should not be forgotten that 94.8 per cent of people who live in Britain are not Muslim. What we are really witnessing through Brexit is the acceleration of a programme of economic regime change by a foreign state – invited in by a weakened political party who understood that their ideology of neoliberal capitalism was falling apart and that they were (and still are) inches from ruin.

One does not need to look far to see that ruin manifested into social harms – best described as a crisis of daily life for the just about managing or left-behinds. Its damning effects are everywhere in housing, health, education, law enforcement, poverty – the list goes on.

Thomas Piketty’s seminal book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ states that “no government programme could be sustained without an apparatus of justification.” The architecture of this deceit as Piketty asserts is that without the think tanks, corporate lobbyists, propaganda, false ‘expert’ reports and spin doctors, change programmes such as Brexit would be politically unattainable.

The con, the really big con, was exploiting these social harms caused by an evidently failed ideology, manipulating the discontent then blaming a minority to effect political change.

truepublica.org.uk

Besides being a grabby old coot who needs to stop joking about complaints over his serially inappropriate touching of females, Joe Biden is a grinning neoliberal sell-out who stands well to the right of majority progressive public opinion. No elegantly crafted three-and-a-half minute campaign launch video on the horrors of Charlottesville and Donald Trump can change that essential fact.

The media trope that portrays “Lunch-Bucket Joe” Biden as a regular, down-to-earth guy who cares deeply about regular folks is pure, unadulterated bullshit. His real constituents wear pinstripe suits and works on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters. They fly around in fancy private jets. And the supposed “everyman liberal” Joe Biden is their loyal apparatchik.

“The Folks at the Top Aren’t Bad Guys”

It’s not for nothing that Biden relies on big money backers, not small and working-class donors – and that he is an especially close ally and beneficiary of Washington lobbyists. He has spent decades ripping on progressive “special interests” while joining with Republicans to advance policies harmful to the working-class.

In 1978, Biden worked for Wall Street by voting to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates with federal student loans. Six years later he did the same to vocational school graduates. In 2005, he worked with Republican allies to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans and thousands of small businesses. The bill put bankruptcy filers under far stricter Chapter 13 rules, turning countless citizens into de facto indentured servants of finance capital (including the many credit card companies headquartered in Delaware.) Biden backed an earlier version of the bill that was too corporatist even for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

He voted against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments.

In 1979, Biden recognized campaign donations from Coca-Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws. That same year he was one of just two Congressional Democrats to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing.

Biden strongly supported the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act. This helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Biden naturally supported the corporate-neoliberal North American Free Trade agreement and the globalist investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.

All of this and more in Biden’s record is richly consistent with the beginning of his political career. He’s been an unapologetic corporatist from the start. As Branko Marcetic noted on Jacobin last summer:

“In 1984, the Washington Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’ who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’ Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the retirement age” (emphasis added).

“The Anti-Populist”

Biden is so corporatist and pro-Wall Street that he can’t join the other corporate (neo) liberals in the 2020 presidential horse race in playing what a still-Left Christopher Hitchens once called (in a sharp volume on the neoliberal Clintons) “the essence of American politics”: “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Biden won’t deign to pay lip-service to populism. Indeed, he has billed himself the “anti-populist” – the antidote to both the right-wing reactionary populism of Trump and the leftish progressive populism of Bernie Sanders.

Biden absurdly criticizes those who advocate a universal basic income of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He opposes calls for free college tuition and Single Payer health insurance. He defends Big Business from popular criticism, writing in 2017 that “Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”

That’s called blaming the working-class victim. It’s also called propagating a fantasy – the existence of a political system in which the working-class majority has the power to hold concentrated wealth and power accountable.

“I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys,” he told the Brookings Institution last year – this as he claimed to worry about how the “gap is yawning” between the super-rich and the rest.

“I Have No Empathy… Give Me a Break”

Joe Biden is such a right-winger that he has even gone so far as to say that he has “no empathy” for Millennials struggle to get by in the savagely unequal and insecure precariat economy he helped create over his many, many years of service to the Lords of Capital. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break,” said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times last year. “No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.”

So what if Millennials face a significant diminution of opportunity, wealth, income and security compared to the Baby Boomers with whom Biden identifies? Who cares if he helped shrink the American Dream for young people with the neoliberal policies and politics he helped advance?

“Reaching Across the Aisle to Get [Capitalist] Things Done”

How Biden has managed to simultaneously distance himself from majority progressive-populist sentiments and pose as a friend of the everyday working man is an interesting question that probably can’t be answered without factoring in the Orwellian role of corporate media in promoting love as hate, war as peace, black as white, and corporate apparatchiks as regular working-class guys.

A critical part of Joe “Anti-Populist” Biden’s media-crafted appeal is his “get things done” claim to be able to “reach out across the aisle” in the famous, hallowed, and CNN- and “P”BS-honored “spirit of bipartisanship.” That’s a shame. Why should we want a president who promises to team up with the widely loathed and creeping fascist white-nationalist Republican Party? And what has the holy bipartisanship that Biden is celebrated for embracing wrought for We the People over the years? Not much. As Andrew Cockburn wrote last month at Harpers:

“By tapping into…popular tropes—‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by a [bipartisan] ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people [Biden backed Bill Clinton’s ‘Three Strikes’ crime and prison bill – P.S.], 1990s welfare ‘reform’ [Biden backed the Clinton-Gingrich abolition of Aid for Families with Dependent Children], Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it” (emphasis added).

Biden even took his embrace of the supposedly sacred virtue of bipartisanship to the grotesque level of forming close friendships with vicious southern white racists like Republican Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the frothing warmonger John McCain.

With Biden as with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and a long line of dismal dollar Democrats in the neoliberal era, there’s an accurate translation for “reaching across the aisle to get things done:” joining hands across the two major party wings of the same corporate-imperial bird of prey to make policy in accord with the wishes of the rich and powerful.

“A March to Peace and Security”

Speaking of young people and empire, no assessment of “Lunch Bucket Joe” (LBJ) Biden is complete without reference to what Institute for Policy Studies foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes calls Biden’s “key role in making possible an inappropriate and utterly disastrous war” – the monumentally criminal and mass-murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq. As Zunes explains at The Progressive:

“As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological agents. And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted that Saddam was ‘seeking nuclear weapons.’”

“At the start of hearings before his committee on July 31, 2002, Biden stated, ‘One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power. If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late…

“In an Orwellian twist of language designed to justify the war resolution, Biden claimed in Senate session in October 2002, ‘I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.’ This gave President Bush the unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States” (emphasis added).

It was an invasion that led to the premature death of 4500 mostly younger U.S. Americans – and of course to much larger Iraqi casualties.

The “Stop Sanders Democrats”

Why is this dirty old imperialist and corporatist dog being rolled out to corporate media acclaim as the supposed people’s alternative to Trump in the White House? It’s all about blocking Bernie Sanders, who is the Democrats’ best chance to win back the presidency since he nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination three years ago (Sanders would have prevailed over the vapid centrist Hillary Clinton but for the corrupt shenanigans of the Democratic National Committee) and is still running (as before) in sincere accord with majority-progressive-populist sentiments on key domestic issues. Norman Solomon has explained it well here at Counterpunch:

“Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders….Urgency is in the media air. Last week, the New York Times told readers that ‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats were ‘agonizing over his momentum.’ The story was front-page news. At the Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: ‘Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.’…Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks—vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Sen. Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA….In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: ‘Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are’” (emphasis added).

Only the popular front-runner Sanders is likely to prevail against Trump even without a recession (certainly a possibility) between now and the election. But, as in the last presidential cycle, corporate-Democratic politicos are working to sabotage the nomination of their most viable candidate in the general election. They are:

+ Flooding the primary campaign with such an absurdly large number of candidates that Sanders will likely be unable to garner the majority of primary delegates required for a first-ballot nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

+ Coordinating among the Democratic Convention super-delegates—the more than 350 county and state party bosses and elected officials who are granted delegate status without election—to vote as a bloc to stop Sanders on the convention’s second ballot. (These super-delegates exist precisely for the purpose of blocking challengers to the party’s corporate establishment.)

+ Working to change state party elections from caucuses to primaries, as caucuses are friendlier to progressive challengers. (Sanders won 11 of the nation’s 18 caucus states three years ago.)

+ Smearing Sanders’ popular social-democratic policy agenda as “fantastic,” “unaffordable,” “unrealistic” and too dangerously “socialist”—this while Democratic elites refuse to acknowledge the fascist tendencies of the president they helped elect in 2016.

+ Branding the electable Sanders “unelectable” on the grounds that he is an “extremist” who is “too far left” for the U.S. electorate generally and independent voters specifically.

The “unelectable” charge is false. Sanders appeals to independents (who are nowhere near as conservative as is commonly reported), people of color, infrequent voters and the white working-class that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party. His anti-establishment message, coupled with his long record of representing rural voters, makes him highly competitive with Trump, not only in the Rust Belts states where Hillary Clinton faltered but even in some dark red states like West Virginia. Even the likes of Karl Rove believe Sanders could defeat Trump in 2020.

Biden is part of the corporate “Stop Sanders” campaign inside the Democratic Party. It helps that he is a white male in an election cycle shaped by the Democrats’ fear that running a woman and/or person of color might fuel the patriarchal and racist sentiments of the Trump base, increasing its turnout in battleground states.

Look for the Democratic establishment to do everything it can to prevent its party from defeating Trump by running its most popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party exists to serve its corporate clients. Its leaders fear the specter of socialism while the world’s most powerful nation threatens to slide into fascism. (Never mind that democratic eco-socialism—a political project significantly more radical than what Sanders is proposing—is precisely what America and the world need right now.) Establishment Democrats would rather lose to a white-nationalist right than even the mildly social-democratic left within their own party. It’s why the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin labeled them “the Inauthentic Opposition.”

The Best Thing Joe Can Do

Joe Biden can wave the bloody flag of Charlottesville all he wants. He is the distilled essence of neoliberal Fake Resistance and Inauthentic Opposition. Barring an economic meltdown between now and the first Tuesday in November of 2020, look for him to get knocked out by the orange beast in the general election if the “Stop Sanders” Democrats are successful.

Keep your passports up to date. Trumpism is Amerikaner fascism, eager to up its ugly game by stepping beyond mere flirtation with mass violence. As Paul Krugman recently told a nonplussed Anderson Cooper on CNN, “if you’re not terrified” yet, then “you]re not paying attention”:

Cooper: “You write that it’s very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.”

Krugman: “Institutions depend upon the willingness of people to obey norms, and occasionally to say, okay, ‘this is not how we do things in our country.’ …This didn’t start with Trump. There’s been a steady erosion of those norms. This has been building for a long time, and we’re very close to the edge right now.”

Cooper: “When you say close to the edge, what does that mean to you?”

Krugman: “You know, on paper, we’ll stay a democracy, but I worry very much about a sort of Hungary-type situation where you have on paper the institutions of democracy. You even hold votes, but the system is rigged, and in fact, it’s become effectively you have a one-party rule…We’re very close. If Trump is re-elected if the Republicans retake control of the House, what are the odds that we will really have a functioning democracy after that?”

Cooper: “I mean, that’s a pretty terrifying idea”

Krugman: “If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention”

What Biden said in his launch video yesterday morning is correct: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation…We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville.” A second Trump term is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Biden says he “can’t stand by and let that happen.”

The irony is the best thing he could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside and tell the rest of the candidate field and voters to congeal behind Sanders. The corporate-neoliberal Democratic Clinton-Obama model is what put the supremely dangerous orange monster in the White House in the first place in 2016. The establishment Democrats, who prefer barbarism to even the mildest hint of socialism, are working to give the monster a second term. If Joe really hates fascism as much as his launch video suggests, then he needs to de-launch. Maybe some activists in Iowa or New Hampshire can set up for his final, politically fatal gropes. Extreme times call for extreme measures. His candidacy is terrifying.

counterpunch.org

Donald Trump’s intermittent political “Svengali,” Stephen Bannon, has set about providing a support umbrella to a growing neo-Nazi and fascist alliance that he calls “The Movement.” Ironically, Bannon, who claims to lead a populist cause against globalism, is using globalist tactics to coordinate his goal of bringing to power and sustaining far-right governments in Europe, the Americas, the Pacific Rim, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Undoubtedly, Bannon is using the experience he acquired as an executive for the extremely globalist Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs, to push his worldwide far-right political agenda.

Bannon has established a secretariat for The Movement in Brussels and a training academy for a far-right army of political leaders and activists at the Trisulti Charterhouse, an 800-year old Roman Catholic Cistercian Order monastery in central Italy. Bannon aims to create a right-wing version of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which is an organization that supports neo-liberalism and corporatism around the world.

From his newly-acquired headquarters in Trisulti, Bannon, who claims to be Catholic, has declared war on Pope Francis I. In an interview with NBC News on the grounds of the Vatican, Bannon declared that Francis’s “liberalism” was destroying the Catholic Church and he blamed the pontiff for the plague of pedophilia that has befallen Catholicism.

In fact, it is Bannon who has been linked to pedophilic activities, including the use of a rental house in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida – leased by him and his former wife, Diane Clohesy – that was the scene of the alleged production of methamphetamines and pornographic films. The famed underwater cinematographer Lawrence Curtis, who rented the home after the Bannons moved out, told Shareblue Media that “the house was used to film pornography, had a constant flow of men, women — and even children — at the house and that blatant drug use was occurring at all hours of the night and day.”

Bannon’s previous stint as vice chairman of the Hong Kong-based video gaming company, International Gaming Entertainment (IGE), had connections to a Hollywood pedophile ring involving principals of IGE and another company, Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).

Using the typical gaslighting tactics employed by the Trump administration – projecting on to enemies accusations made against them – Bannon appears to have enlisted the support of former Pope Benedict XVI, who has remained silent in retirement after being forced from the papacy in the church’s pedophilia scandal, to attack Pope Francis.

In a recent letter, his first public pronouncement since stepping down as Pope in 2013, Benedict issued forth from his secluded apartment on the grounds of the Vatican a litany of conservative Catholic attacks against “liberalism” in the church. Benedict’s points were suspiciously like those of Bannon, who happened to be in Rome when the former pope penned his letter.

Benedict blamed liberal tendencies in the Catholic Church for pedophilia problems, not the code of silence employed by himself and his fellow archbishopric right-wingers who presided over pedophile priests being transferred from diocese to diocese to avoid civil criminal prosecution. Benedict’s blaming the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of Pope John XXIII and the 1960’s “sexual revolution” for all the church’s present woes is pure “Bannonism,” the type of far-right codswallop usually found in the ruminations of Internet hate sites like Breitbart News, for which Bannon was served as editor.

It was Benedict’s pre-papal stint as the powerful chief of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that allowed major figures in the church, including Australian Cardinal George Pell – now imprisoned in Australia after his conviction for pedophilia – to get away with protecting pedophile priests from criminal prosecution. Church officials in the United States, Chile, Ireland and other countries conspired with Benedict in what was, perhaps, one of the largest criminal conspiracies in history.

Pope Francis has, unlike Benedict, taken a much firmer stance against pedophilia plaguing the priesthood. For example, Francis recently stripped the politically-influential former Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, of both his cardinal status and priesthood. McCarrick has powerful friends in right-wing circles, including the pro-fascist Catholic order, Opus Dei, which counts the former Blackwater mercenary firm’s founder, Erik Prince, among its supporters in the Washington area. Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary for Donald Trump.

Bannon’s Movement, with its secretariat in Brussels, is under the aegis of Mischaël Modrikamen, leader of the Belgian People’s Party, a right-wing Zionist-oriented Walloonian party that is allied with right-wing parties in Flanders, Italy, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Spain. It would appear, at first glance, that Modrikamen, who is Jewish, would have nothing to do with neo-Nazi grand alliances. The interwar years of the 1930s are replete with examples of cooperation between Zionists and Nazis, including, for example, the “Transfer Agreement” between the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Palästina Treuhandstelle (Palestine Trustee Office or Haavara), the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and Adolf Hitler that saw Germany grant permission and exit visas for German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in return for cash transfers into Nazi coffers. Other areas of cooperation were seen in Hollywood, where Jewish movie moguls agreed, for a period during the 1930s, to tamp down anti-Nazi motion pictures that were deemed offensive to the Third Reich.

Modrikamen helped introduce Bannon to like-minded fascists, who prefer the loaded title of “populists,” around Europe. For Bannon, setting up a training academy for fascist cadres is a major milestone for his global right-wing crusade. Bannon plans to teach future fascist leaders a history of the world that is focused on white European “Judeo-Christian” superiority over other religions and peoples, particularly Islam and Muslims. It is such a fractured view of history that prompted deadly terrorist attacks by Bannon’s fellow-travelers in Oslo in 2011; Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; Quebec City, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017; Annapolis, Maryland in 2018; and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

Bannon may have stepped over the legal limits in his attacks on Pope Francis from Vatican and Italian soil. The Holy See is a recognized nation-state by the United States and Francis is its internationally-recognized head of state. The US accredited US ambassador to the Vatican is Callista Gingrich, the wife of Republican former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich. Bannon’s involvement as a private citizen in what amounts to a blatant attempt to create a political rift within the Vatican hierarchy and the overthrow of the Holy See’s head of state is a violation of the Logan Act of 1799, a law that forbids private US citizens from making foreign policy, without authorization, on behalf of the United States government.

The Logan Act is very clear:

“Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Bannon is also in clear violation of the US Neutrality Act, which forbids American citizens from participating in hostile acts against nations with which the United States is at peace.

Bannon cannot have it both ways. If Soros, Bannon’s nemesis, has been guilty of violating the Logan and Neutrality Acts, so, too, has Bannon.

Bannon appears to be comfortable in his new surroundings of the Trisulti monastery. However, based on his flagrant violation of US law, Bannon should, instead, be enjoying the confines of a US Bureau of Prisons cell in the United States.

A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they warn, “is falling apart before our eyes,” as Britain prepares for Brexit and “populist and nationalist” parties look poised to make sweeping gains in elections across the continent.

The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elite’s European house journals, newspapers such as the Guardian. “We must now fight for the idea of Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” their document reads. Failure means “resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be “the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster.”

Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist right in Germany.

Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the manifesto’s signatories – not least Henri-Levy himself – have a well-known passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two world wars last century.

Instead let us focus on their claim that “populism and nationalism” are on the verge of slaying Europe’s liberal democratic tradition and the values held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope presumably is that their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an irreversible turn for the worse.

Liberalism’s Collapse

In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble — the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed — and failed catastrophically.

These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the inevitable outcome of this shrinking elite’s continuing promotion – against all rational evidence – of liberalism as a solution to our current predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying us.

Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.

But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism’s abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal’s political project.

The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomized communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.

Humanitarian Resource Grabs

The liberal’s professed concern for others’ welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism’s humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims’ inheritance.

Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishized – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources.

Meanwhile, the absolute prioritizing of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet’s wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.

Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.

And so, the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder nature’s riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on, that new balance – what we limply term “climate change” – will necessitate that we are stripped from the planet.

Dangerous Arrogance

One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all. But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilized, as primitive.

The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberal’s relentless and exclusive focus is on “progress,” growth, accumulation.

What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the center of our social organization.

This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism, not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. have been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.

Status-quo Cheerleaders

As a result, we now have three clear political trends.

The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of liberalism’s latest – last? – manifesto. With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how we might extricate ourselves.

Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately as “populism,” as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.

This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two alternatives.

The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalism’s failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.

The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.

Where Hope Can Reside

The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the “dissenters” – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.

Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilize. But the liberals and authoritarians understand this as threat to their own privilege and, under a confected hysteria about “fake news,” are rapidly working to snuff out even this small space.

We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.

We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers, historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.

We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears to their siren song.

There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our infinitely small corner of the universe.

consortiumnews.com

The emptiest, dumbest platitude of our time, uttered both by establishment stiffs like the Archbishop of Canterbury and by self-styled radical leftists, is that the 1930s have made a comeback. Treating that dark decade as if it were a sentient force, a still-extant thing, observers from both the worried bourgeoisie and the edgy left insist the Thirties have staggered back to life and have much of the West in their reanimated deathly grip. Looking at Brexit, the European turn against social democracy, the rise of populist parties, and the spread of ‘yellow vest’ revolts, the opinion-forming set sees fascism everywhere, rising zombie-like from its grave, laying to waste the progressive gains of recent decades.

This analysis is about as wrong as an analysis can be. Comparing contemporary political life to events of the past is always an imperfect way of understanding where politics is at. But if we really must search for echoes of today in the past, then it isn’t the 1930s that our era looks and feels like – it’s the 1840s. In particular 1848. That is the year when peoples across Europe revolted for radical political change, starting in France and spreading to Sweden, Denmark, the German states, the Italian states, the Habsburg Empire, and elsewhere. They were democratic revolutions, demanding the establishment or improvement of parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, the removal of old monarchical structures and their replacement by independent nation states or republics. 1848 is often referred to as the Spring of Nations.

Sound familiar? Of course 2018 has not been as tumultuous as 1848 was. There have been ballot-box protests and street-based revolts but no attempts at actual revolutions. And yet our era also feels like a Spring of Nations. In Europe especially. There are now millions of people across Europe who want to re-establish the ideals of nationhood, of national sovereignty and popular democracy, against what we might view as the neo-monarchical structures of 21st-century technocracy. The sustained gilets jaunes revolts in France capture this well. Here we have an increasingly monarchical ruler – the aloof, self-styled Jupiterian presidency of Emmanuel Macron – being challenged week in, week out by people who want greater say and greater national independence. ‘Macron = Louis 16’, said graffiti in the gilets jaunes-ruled streets during one of their revolts. And we know what happened to him (though in 1793, of course, not 1848).

France’s February Revolution of 1848 – which brought to an end the constitutional monarchy that had been established in 1830 and led to the creation of the Second Republic – was one of the key igniters of the people’s spring that spread through Europe in 1848. Today, likewise, the gilets jaunes revolts have spread. In recent weeks yellow-vest protesters in Belgium have tried to storm the European Commission – an unprecedented event, which got strikingly little media coverage – while yellow vests in the Netherlands have called for a referendum on EU membership and in Italy they have gathered to express support for their Eurosceptic government. That election in Italy was a key event of 2018. Coming in March, it brought to power the League and the Five Star Movement, parties loathed by the EU establishment, and in the process it shattered the delusions that had gripped many European observers following the election of Macron last year – that Macron’s victory represented the fading-away of the populist moment. Italy disproved that, French revolters confirmed it, and local and national elections everywhere from Germany to Sweden added further weight to the fact that the populist revolt is not going away anytime soon.

When you’re in the thick of something, when you’re reading daily reports about the elite’s war on Brexit and seeing tweeted photos of Paris burning and watching as the EU declares political war on the elected government of Italy, it can be hard to appreciate the historic nature of what is going on. Or just the magnitude of it. We all get so bogged down in the ins and outs of the Brexit ‘negotiations’ (in truth there is no real negotiation, but rather mild disagreements between the UK and EU establishments over how Brexit might be most smoothly killed off). We pore over graphs showing the collapse in public support for the old mainstream parties, especially social-democratic ones. We express surprise at the corrosion of consensus politics even in Sweden, that traditionally most consensual of countries. But it can be hard to piece things together and create a bigger picture. We should try to, though, because then we might see that ours really is an era of revolt, of chaos even – but welcome, good, fruitful chaos.

What we have, across Europe, is people calling into question the prevailing political, moral and cultural order. These are not mere economic revolts, even in France, where economic issues have certainly been in the mix. Leftist observers, when they can bring themselves to confront the revolting moment, have tried to reduce the populist uprising to a cry for help by the ‘left behind’ or the ‘economically vulnerable’. The vote for Brexit was really caused by people’s sense of economic insecurity, they claim. Such analysis demeans the populist revolt; it empties it of its genuinely radical character, of its conscious challenge not only to the neoliberalism that is central to the EU project but far more importantly to the cultural norms and political practices of the new elites in 21st-century Europe. To say ‘These people are poor and that’s why they’re angry’ is to rob these people of their radical agency.

In a sense, 2018 is less like 1848 itself and more like the decades that preceded that tumultuous year. These were, in the words of Trygve Tholfsen in his 1977 study of working-class radicalism in the run-up to 1848, ‘hungry decades’ – decades in which disgruntlement and radicalism bristled and grew before exploding in firm demands for change. And though many people were alarmingly poor in these ‘hungry decades’, it wasn’t their ‘immediate deprivation’ that drove them to organise and take action, says Tholfsen; rather, their instinct for revolt was built on ‘solid intellectual foundations’ and it expressed a ‘denial of the legitimacy of the social and political order’. We have something similar today. Yes, Macron’s fuel tax hit people’s pockets; yes, many Brexit voters are less well-off than the Remainer elites; yes, Eurosceptic Italian youths struggle to find work. But their revolts, whether at the ballot box or on the streets, are energised by more than ‘immediate deprivation’ – they are built upon a denial of the legitimacy of the existing political and cultural order.