What Explains the Rise in Populism Globally?

Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

David Goodhart, in his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, argues that there is now a new political fault line in politics today.

This fault line separates those who come from “somewhere” – people rooted in a specific place or community, socially conservative, often less educated – as opposed to those who could come from “anywhere.” These people are urban, socially liberal and university educated.

Ian Bremmer’s 2018 book Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism, makes the same distinctions. A large segment of society, he writes, isn’t partaking in any economic growth and when workers see threats to their livelihoods, they demand barriers against cheap labour and unfamiliar faces.

But liberal elites in western counties have managed to create the impression that the conflict over immigration is between defenders of human rights on the one hand, and xenophobic nationalists on the other. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple; immigration can have negative economic effects on workers, yet the trade-offs inherent in any public policy are rarely openly debated when it comes to this subject.

In fact, there is an absence of thoughtful, rational debate on national identity. This is in part because of social pressures like political correctness, which make it taboo to express opinions that don't jibe with that mainstream view. But it's also because of a bias in important institutions, which reinforce what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once referenced as the ideal of a “post-nationa” society.

Many different institutions create this bias, including a normative liberal press, NGOs funded by liberal foundations, and scholars from institutions dominated by identity politics and connected to an international academic community, who lend their authority to a politically correct narrative. Finally, we have a judiciary which can strike down government actions through judicial review, even when these actions are supported by legislative majorities.

Too often, liberal institutions discount the value of rootedness and tend to run roughshod over local attachments. The open immigration policies of most First World countries have undercut national identities. So have international trade agreements that favour the mobility of labour and capital, and reduce the control of states over their own economic policies.

From the point of view of the “anywheres,” institutions like these serve a moral purpose: to advance the goals of a common humanity without regard to specific local or national communities.

Yet whatever their advantages, the power of these bodies sows discontent among those rooted in a particular place and with a particular group. They feel disconnected from the political processes that govern them. This creates resentment.

We shouldn't be surprised that the result is a turn toward populist politics – where candidates claim to represent the views and interests of the average person, instead of grand ideals coming out of courtrooms, universities and international trade conferences.

Whether today's greater voice for populists is a good thing or not is certainly debatable. Many people argue convincingly that populists don't govern well.

My point is that there is more to the story than saying one side of today's politics is "woke" while the other remains ignorant. It's more complicated.

The central conflict of our times is not between left and right but between people from “Somewhere” and people from “Anywhere.” As I citizen of three countries, and with four university degrees, there's no doubt that I qualify as an “anywhere.” But I can appreciate how the “somewheres” feel.

Is Israel’s Supreme Court Too Powerful?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Those who follow the rhetoric endlessly spewed by Israel’s many enemies know that it is referred to, ad nauseam, as a theocracy, a racist country, a colonial-settler state, an apartheid entity, even a genocidal nation, among other definitions. 

It is compared to the formerly white-minority ruled Rhodesia and South Africa, and even Nazi Germany. 

Its enemies are so obsessed with it that, in their fevered imagination, they consider it worse than such countries as Iran, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe -- all involved in massive human rights violations.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that Israel, has a very powerful supreme court composed of liberals and leftists, who are the bane of right-wingers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down. 

Indeed, its detractors consider the country a “judiciocracy.”

Israel’s parliament, the 120-seat Knesset, is a unicameral legislature, with no upper house to review legislation it passes. 

It is also a Westminster-style political system, with the executive branch, including the prime minister, comprising elected members of the assembly. The presidency is largely a ceremonial position.

Supporters of the Supreme Court insist that any limitation on judicial review will render the country vulnerable to an unchecked Knesset.

But it’s the court that is unchecked. Virtually every difference between the legislature or executive and the court is resolved in favor of the latter. There are virtually no safeguards against its power.

In Canada, the circumstances in which our court can intervene in actions taken by the other branches of government are circumscribed. Its authority is limited to those cases brought before it. 

And decisions can be overridden by the “notwithstanding clause” of the constitution.

Not so in Israel. There the court itself routinely disqualifies government actions on grounds that amount to little more than disapproval, hobbling the legislators elected by the people.

It makes frequent use of a doctrine it calls “interpretation by objective purpose,” which means that a law can be interpreted neither according to its plain meaning nor according to the legislature’s intent, but however the court deems appropriate.

In a further expansion of the already considerable power it wields, the court has agreed to review the constitutionality of last year’s Knesset passage of the Nation-State law, which states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”

It was passed as a Basic Law. They are Israel’s equivalent of constitutional legislation, since the state has no constitution as such.

Attendees at a conservative political conference held in May in Jerusalem have suggested that the Knesset rein in the power of the court by passing a Canadian-style “override” law.

It would scale back a judicial system felt to be controlled by unelected elites, one they frequently refer to as Israel’s “deep state,” and would block the High Court from overturning Knesset legislation or government administrative decisions.

The Israeli academy and intelligentsia, as well as the cultural, media, legal, and bureaucratic elites, are characterized by a pronounced progressivism, while the dominant conservative voice in the Israeli public gets ignored by them.

How did this come about? Amiad Cohen, the director of the Tikvah Fund in Israel, explained that since the 1990s a period of liberal judicial activism spearheaded by former Supreme Court head Aharon Barak has become ever more pronounced.

As Bar-Ilan University Professor Moshe Koppel asked, should Israelis “feel more threatened by a relatively large and heterogeneous body that stands for re-election from time to time, or by a small and homogeneous body that has been inbred for generations, is answerable to nobody, and has consistently extended its own authority?”

For him, the answer is clear. As liberal decrees replace legislative powers. decision making, in other words, sovereignty itself, is being relocated to the courts.

The Media’s Role in Shaping Our Perceptions

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

As a news junkie I watch various all-news channels religiously, mostly BBC World News, CTV News Channel, and CBC News Network.

What these networks all have in common, since they have to fill up so much airtime, is making use of various “experts” and “analysts” who comment on the news stories being reported. 

These people are usually academics or else affiliated with the seemingly limitless number of “think tanks,” with fancy names that usually include words like global, international, development, governance, progress, rights, democratic, and so on.

They select these “talking heads” to provide the proper “analysis” so that viewers will absorb the news “correctly.”

The proliferation of this type of reporting is an insidious way of shaping, and often altering, the “narrative.”

Two Americans, Joseph P. Overton and Daniel C. Hallin, came up with theories for the way this works.  

A senior vice president of the Mackinac Centre in Michigan, Overton described the political strategy that later became known as the Overton Window.

It is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. He states that politically unpopular, unacceptable views, if they are to be enacted into law, must be transformed into politically acceptable policies. 

That’s because politicians generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as “legitimate” policy options.

So these views are often first disseminated through the media as well as by educational institutions and other civil society organizations.

Hallin, a communications professor at the University of California in San Diego, posits a theory which has come to be known as Hallin’s Spheres.

Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. 

The sphere of consensus is the inner circle, the place in which most people, including journalists, tend to agree.

The sphere of “legitimate” controversy includes the questions within the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral.

Then we have deviance, which falls outside the bounds of journalistic conversation and which journalists can ignore or even denounce.

Here, they depart from standard norms of objective reporting and treat as marginal, dangerous, or ridiculous individuals and groups who fall outside a range of views taken as legitimate.

Hallin used the concept of framing to describe the presentation and reception of issues in public. He also wrote about an opinion corridor, in which the range of public opinion narrows, and opinion outside that corridor moves from legitimate controversy into deviance.

This, in inconspicuous ways, is how ideology gets disseminated and eventually becomes the “normal,” in other words hegemonic, way of perceiving the world. Thinking outside that box becomes lonely and sometimes even dangerous.

Since Hallin assumes a sliding scale of legitimate political conversation, yesterday’s mainstream ideas may today be considered completely out of bounds, while the reverse is also true. Moving the needle in a certain direction is an apt metaphor.

Politicians and intellectuals find this out at their peril, when someone discovers something they wrote or said a few decades earlier, but which has since become “politically incorrect.”

This often derails their careers, and they retroactively become toxic, as the zeitgeist shifts, sometimes with surprising speed, in what we may describe as cultural revolutions.

Do We Really Have A Free Press?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer


U.S. President Donald Trump, Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban, the right-wing Polish Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party, and Britain’s anti-EU Brexiteers, have unnerved establishment organs such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, and Britain’s Guardian, among others.

They have become very shrill in “defending” a “free press” -- as opposed to the what they consider the “fake news” of  anti-establishment “samizdats.” 

But what they really mean is that they adhere to what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a country’s “truth regime,” that is, the ideologically acceptable views of its ruling elites in a given zeitgeist. 

In that sense, the Soviet flagship newspaper Pravda also was “free” – it could run debates within its pages about various policy differences within the nomenklatura, arguments about Marxist-Leninist theory, and so forth.

But it could not challenge the overarching hegemonic power of the ruling Communist circles. That remained off-limits. 

The same holds true for “respectable” discourse in today’s western mass media, which must adhere to a liberal-to-socialist-left political line and its pop slogans. In other words, there are certain parameters which define what is appropriate in public discourse. 

Just as Pravda was not able to publish what Communists would have considered “anti-socialist propaganda,” so today views not deemed “politically correct” are looked at with disfavour.

At best, they are deemed “provocative,” “controversial,”  “problematic,” or “divisive,” alerting readers to be on the lookout to discount them should they appear in print.

Opinions not seen as worthy of serious consideration are often tagged with words such as “skeptics”, “deniers”, or “populists” (an elastic word that is applied to anyone the liberal media disparages). Such views are, to use religious language, heretical.

So today, many people increasingly distrust and resent the mainstream media. A major reason is that many journalists have crossed the line from reporting to advocacy. In effect, they have adopted a new liberal creed: “all the news that’s ‘politically correct’ to print.”

They have created a social space in which they lord their ideology over everybody else and become the arbiter of what we should believe. As a result, newsrooms are often out of touch with the communities they serve.

Many Canadians feel alienated due to the kind of news coverage that gives more airtime to progressive voices favouring political correctness while stigmatizing religious or conservative views.

This is bad news for journalists, and bad news for journalism. Because as people continue down the path of growing mistrust of the mainstream media, they will start looking for alternatives.

It also allows people like Trump, himself accused of spreading falsehoods, to portray the media who constantly attack him as themselves purveyors of “fake news.” 

Trump in 2016, remember, ran against the entire political class, including the national political media.

In his 1945 article “The Freedom of the Press,” George Orwell noted that “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.”

It is time the journalistic mainstream addressed this problem. Motivated by good intentions, it has allowed a narrow orthodoxy to restrict debate about the burning questions that confront us today.