Discussion
Both right and left populists share at least 1 idea in common; a legend of a Golden Age that we can and should "go back" to. For the right, it's a mostly mythical version of the 1940s/50s, where different races keep to themselves, mostly within ethnically homogeneous nation-states. For the left, it's the heydey of the Keynesian welfare state, between the mid-1930s and mid-1970s.
(1/?)
Both sides seem to agree that the societies produced by welfare states were better than what we have now. Yet "centre-left' parties continues to nominate neoliberals as candidates, and the left keeps voting for them. The right populists must be just as confused and frustrated by that, as left populists are when their counterparts on the right vote for "small government" neoconservative Republicans, who similarly work against their interests.
(2/?)
Why don't either of the major parties in most multiparty elections reflect this nonpartisan nostalgia for social welfare policy?
To understand this, I think we need to look back to the beginning of the end of welfarism as a political-economic paradigm. IMHO this came in the 1970s, when the oil shocks were pushing governments towards industrial policy based on moving to renewables.
(3/?)
This provoked a desperate defensive reaction from fossil fool companies. Their wealth depended - in both long term *and* short term, because of the "stranded assets" problem - on undermining any industrial policy supporting renewables.
But there was no credible scientific or strategic argument against transitioning to renewables. So the only way to undermine pro-renewables industrial policy supporting was to undermine the very idea of countries having industrial policy at all.
(4/?)
To do that, they had to undermine the very idea of democracy; that citizens have a right to collectively decide how the common resources of our countries ought to be deployed. To make sure we all get our basic needs met, and some of our social aspirations too.
Instead, they told us, we had to "leave it to The Market". In other words, rather than voting in governments to push renewables through industrial policy, we should wait for "investors" to fund them and then vote with our wallets.
(5/?)
Oil companies might have struggled to build a convincing case for this alone. Fortunately for them (but unfortunately for the rest of us), a range of other industries were also frustrated with public regulation. Which closed off certain opportunities for profit, by taking strategic actions to safeguard citizens' welfare and advance the public interest. Plenty of deep pockets stood to benefit from undermining the radical idea that democratic governments exist to do exactly that.
(6/?)
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
