How to Deal with Populism
caracaschronicles.com
caracaschronicles.com
Brexit and immigration is a good example of this. Blair decided mass immigration was a good idea for a number of reasons. At some point they surely realised that although it would provide an economic boost, some people would lose out financially and most did not want significant cultural change in their community. Over the years larger dissatisfaction with this policy grew and grew, only to be labelled racist by the ruling parties. This led to UKIP which led to splits in the Conservative party which led to Brexit.
Ignore a valid issue long enough and resentment will spread across the country. If these peoples concerns and wishes were not sacrificed for ulterior motives a EU ref would likely never occur.
Parallels to US/Trump seem reasonable. Large groups of people whose concerns have not necessarily been address because the contrary policies benefit an already privileged and distant few.
tldr: Offer real solutions to the large number of poor and struggling people in your country. Even if it slows down your grander plan. If you don't, resentment will build and there are more of them than you.
edit: The absolute biggest danger to the embedded powers is that Trump succeeds and does a good job. Hard to overstate this.
Like children who grew up being sheltered, then came to college and saw protesting (blaming others) is the answer.
Why feed the polarization like that? What do you gain from it?
Then they see immigrants arriving around the same time all this is happening and assign the blame to them.
Why is a country that as high unemployment allowing high levels of immigration? Being mad about that seems highly rational to me
Hiring immigrants isn't necessarily cheaper or easier. It's something employers do because they can't fill those jobs otherwise.
What if they did something crazy, like offer higher wages to attract employees?
That last part is rarely, if ever, mentioned when the "locals won't do these jobs" nonsense gets trotted out.
Is the reason there are so many immigrants in IT because the job doesn't pay well enough?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
The idea that there is a STEM shortage is a bonafide myth. Remember that we're talking about the same industry that perpetuated the largest wage fixing cartel in human history.
It's amazing how many people around here just can't wrap their heads around the fact that increased labor supply means lower wages. You only have to listen to a handful of earnings calls with giant corporations talking with glee about how elastic the labor markets are, and how that will be a huge boon to their earnings.
Why can they find work if unemployment is high? I see a few possible answers: 1. Unemployment isn't actually high, 2. Employers are illegally paying immigrants below minimum wage knowing they have no legal recourse, or 3. They are taking jobs that those here are unwilling to take.
How does a crackdown on illegal immigration speak to any of this?
UKIP know that a lot of people are racist and only too happy to have a finger to point at whatever scapegoat sounds believable to them.
Businesses do provide jobs of course, buying some of the locals.
There are real economic problems, and the press have been quite effective at blaming them on immigration when really they're more due to inequality.
> Trump succeeds and does a good job
Succeeds for whom? Different people want very different things, that's where politics comes from in the first place. What would "success" look like? How much global warming does it include?
For some Americans, the executive order banning entry for a list of nationalities means that their spouses can never leave the country again and are at greatly increased risk of being deported.
(There's a similar argument happening in the UK where "success" for some people means unemployment for others, or even being obliged to leave the country)
And falling back on calling everyone a racist again.
Which is precisely what this article says doesn't work.
That's a nice way of saying "everyone admitted they're racists".
No-one in that thread did.
The most ridiculous thing about all this is that I actually come from a white immigrant community (dutch around a port town), but my generation acculturised with the UK.
It really sticks in your craw when I'm generally a left-leaning liberalist but some tit like pjc50 starts accusing you of being a racist because I've been in supermarkets obviously filled with white immigrants as they're all speaking polish.
It really has helped me realise how devoid of empathy people who start accusing everyone of racism for merely discussing immigration are.
It's incredibly upsetting to be called a racist merely for asking why mass migration to the UK has been allowed. It's a perfectly reasonable question.
Also he really doesn't understand the meaning of the word immigrant, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471112
It is all a load of bullshit.
It is a good example of how the constituents wishes (preserve culture of local community ) is at complete odds with the governments wishes. They can keep on throwing money at them, but it will never address this issue that many people find very important.
My question: is it a National Government's job to maintain the culture of local communities? I would hope not.
There's more than a few countries that have laws stating that it's essentially treason to modify the demographics of the nation. Seems to have worked quite well for Japan at the national level.
Left technocrats see immigration as a human rights issue. Freedom of movement is a well-recognized fundamental human right; your ability to move from Gloucester to London is enshrined in Britain's unwritten constitution. Left technocrats do not see the movement from Paris to London to be any different than the movement from Gloucester to London.
Right technocrats see immigration as a free market issue. One cannot have a truly free market in goods and services unless service providers can freely travel.
So compromising on immigration means compromising on principles. Sometimes it's expedient to do so, but I vote for my representatives based on their principles and how closely they appear to adhere to them.
The real issue is individualism versus collectivism. Populists think that groups' freedom of association trumps individuals' freedom of movement, while individualists think the opposite.
The fact that restricting immigration is a group choice while not donating money is an individual choice changes nothing about the morality. Either way, you're choosing to increase your own standard of living instead of helping someone who is already much worse off than yourself.
The cynic in me thinks the real difference is who pays. Educated people living on the coasts bear the same costs as less educated people in border areas when it comes to food donations, but bear a small fraction of the costs when it comes to increased immigration. That makes it easier for them to support the latter in comparison to committing to the former.
But both issues are similarly nuanced.
In the same way I can't just trust that a donation to any random opaque 'help the children' fund is actually effectively helping starving children, we can't just blindly open all borders and take in every tired, poor, huddled mass.
But there is a very, very clear middle ground.
I can research aid organizations to find one that I believe will use my donation effectively.
We can build systems to establish qualified immigrants with the same basic starting point we agree everyone should have (food stamps/healthcare/temporary unemployment assistance/affordable housing) so they can start a life here.
A connection is seen between outsourcing and free trade deals, and that's a much better target. Now, it's arguable that free trade deals are economically beneficial, but they look bad. Trump gets that, and Democrats fell down in that regard.
But the anti-immigration scapegoating? That's not causality, that's scapegoating. Immigration is not the cause of the woes of the Rust Belt, but it gives them something to blame, and a populist leader can exploit that.
Fewer regulations will mean freer movement of capital, which has historically been a great boon for the wealthy and powerful.
If he manages to double down on coal production, the ensuing government subsidies will benefit those with the resources to capitalize on the undermining of the market (after all, any time you introduce predictability into the market, you are handing money to people who have the influence and resources to exploit it).
If he succeeds in building the wall, then he will have successfully shifted blame for existing economic woes onto Mexican migrants, without evidence, which will mean increased popular mandate for governmental power grabs.
If he succeeds in undermining climate change, he will have two benefits: first, he will have vanquished scientific and evidence-based opposition in general, and second, he will have undermined barriers between business and exploitation of known public health undermining scenarios.
If he succeeds in cowing the media, he will have removed one of the few non-governmental checks and balances on transparency of government.
Finally, if he succeeds in general, it will be at the expense of the already tenuous necessity for politicians to tie their agendas to evidence/science-based approaches to policy creation.
I say all of this not as an inveterate liberal, but as someone who is continually bewildered by the fact that Trump can make things up, without evidence, and have sufficient support to transform them into public policy. Actually I should cop to the fact that I'm not that bewildered--history is of course littered with leaders who have done the same, and whether or not they actually benefit the people who brought them to power is really an analyst's roulette game.
I have no idea how you people come to these conclusions. I mean, if I watched more mainstream media and believed everything I was told, I suppose I can see how you would come to these sorts of conclusions. I can assure you they are wrong. I mean the CIA is against Trump and is trying to de-legitimize his election after the fact. Are those the "embedded powers" who will be happy if he succeeds? Who are you even talking about? The only ones on Trumps side are probably half the GOP, and the people, that's it, everybody else is against him.
This is so important.
Samantha Bee can't stop making piss jokes about Trump. That's not going to win anyone over.
Nina Donovan's poem, recited by Ashley Judd at the Women's March, is brave and powerful. It is also polarizing. There is a line: "I’m not as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheeto dust." That's not going to win anyone over.
Again and again, people are attacking Trump for the wrong reasons. Focus on the truly bad. Don't get hung up on his hair. It makes you look petty.
Edit: Frank Bruni beat me to this in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/opinion/the-wrong-way-to-...
Exactly. It's Samantha Bee's job to feed the polarization cycle. If she doesn't, who will?
But that audience is free to ask for less focus on the insubstantial.
There's a difference between "winning everybody over" vs "do your part to contribute to polite discourse" vs "make your side sound dominated by insult-spewing jerks". Parent wasn't asking for total perfect solution, only to stop contributing to needless antagonism.
> Don’t waste your time trying to prove that this ism is better than that ism. Ditch all the big words. Why? Because, again, the problem is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re much more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot.
> The problem is tribal. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them: that you are American in exactly the same way they are.
I disagree. Attacking him at all is a huge mistake, at least until you/the opposition can offer a credible alternative (which Hillary isn't/wasn't). People will put up with all the bad that Trump is, as long as all the alternatives are worse (and yes, economic reasons will trump moral/social reasons for most people except the most well-off).
But the problem is that her mannerisms aren't really whats bad about her. And Trump's alleged kinks aren't whats bad about him. Its easy for his supporters to defend him and say that either it is not true, because there isn't any public evidence that it is, or that there is nothing wrong with a piss fetish. And they are right. There is nothing wrong with it.
Heres the podcast in case anyone is interested: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox
Yet the doom that faces America is very real, and this is really the cause of their emotions. Intuitively they know we can't consume so much without producing it. If we offshore production, we must eventually offshore consumption. Chinese workers earning $5 a day, Chinese factories paying no attention to the environment or workers rights, this is really the ONLY problem we need to address. And the liberal elites don't care, because they don't make money making things, and never did.
Are you a liberal elite wanting to heal the divide? Build a factory in the USA. A real, physical factory that builds real, physical things. And if you do the math and realize you can't do that and compete with China, then fight like hell to punish Chinese producers for playing the game by unfair rules (e.g. impose tariffs to at least bring the price up to what it would be if they paid their people a living wage, benefits, and protected the environment).
Your prescription for solving the problem is more or less identical to what Trump has stated he plans to do with respect to trade with China.
Populism is how democracy is supposed to work.
That is called propaganda though.
The following is a list of US populist complaints, which Trump successfully addressed. (Don't up/down-vote based on whether you agree or not with the issues of the list, which I may or may not, just note that the points are important to enough people to vote a Trump into office.) In no particular order...
Facilitation/celebration of LGBQT (most people aren't, and find differing sexualities repulsive). Demands for "safe spaces" while eliminating the only long socially established safe spaces: sexually segregated restrooms. Taking taxpayer earnings and spending them on advocacy of opposing views. Reducing a sense of safety vs crime, while seemingly protecting criminals (this issue dominated by the US "gun culture"). Laying blame/responsibility for environmental issues on those thinking themselves not guilty (say, global warming). Stifling parental preferences in education (Common Core, lack of school vouchers, absolute intolerance of anything hinting of Christianity). Broad/unrelenting accusations of whites & males as invariably & irredeemably sexist/misogynist/xenophobic/racist/etc (say, Hillary's declaration of 1/4 of Americans as "deplorables"). Incredible growth of national debt ($10,000,000,000,000 in last 8 years, doubling all previous debt) with prospect of populace having to pay it. Lack of jobs (need for jobs has far outstripped creation of jobs). Overwhelming regulations, making compliance & cost untenable. Abortion being considered, on the whole, inexcusable murder of children.
Understand that classic US culture is deeply rooted in individual liberty & rights. Basically, taking someone's money to make them pay for something they don't want angers them; they'll put up with a lot, but once "enough!" hits they're prone to taking dramatic steps to end the offense. Also note that the USA is huge, having a broad range of views from coast to coast; what Hillary offered was "coastal" culture, while Trump appealed to "heartland", and with the Electoral College deliberately biasing Presidential elections toward populist views, the large number of central states won the vote.
I believe most people in the US are accepting of homosexuality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_attitudes_toward_homo...
> 46 percent of respondents said transgender people should be required to “use the public restrooms of the gender they were born into.”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/half-of...
It's hard work, but what I've found to work is this: Instead of getting into an argument, state what you believe and talk with them in terms of cooperatively finding out what claim is correct. Don't let your ego get in the way. Figure out what exact parts of the claim they believe (or disbelieve), and research those specific parts, with them present. For example, say someone doesn't believe in global warming. Maybe they just don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, or they misunderstand some of the evidence. Shouting that they're stupid (which I've done before, it's about as ineffective and childish as it sounds) won't work, because you aren't addressing their actual concerns, which they themselves might not be fully aware of.
This is slow, hard work, but it does pay off. You have to keep an open mind, and be 100% aware of your own behavior. If you are dismissive because of a value difference between you and the other persons cultural background, it's counter productive. Likewise, if you can't admit when you're wrong, then it doesn't work either. Admit when you don't know something, and that you are flawed and imperfect like everyone else. Take this as an opportunity to learn about your own beliefs.
A concrete example: A close friend believes some conspiracy theories (no AGW, moonlanding faked, etc.) I've successfully gotten him to go from the position of "Global warming is a liberal conspiracy" to "Climate change is a real and serious issue, but I'm not 100% on the evidence for it being man-made". This has been really hard work over a period of about a year, but it's worth it. I'm not done, but this is how it's gone so far. Any time he expresses his opinion about this, I'll express that I disagree. This usually leads to some anger on his part because people tend to get their opinions wrapped up in their identity and take disagreement as a personal attack. I 'll point that out if things get too heated. Instead of just saying "no" or "you're wrong", I'll say something like, "well let's find out. I could be wrong." A lot of times, he won't believe the research I pull up, or pull up a denier website. I go through the denier websites and investigate claims point by point. For example, quotes from people who have since changed their mind, cherry picked lines from studies, things like that. Most of the time, it didn't seem like there was any progress made that session, but the next time it came up, his opinion would be a little more nuanced, or his opinion would move a little away from the conspiracy.
It's slow, gradual work, but we are both more educated on many issues because of this. I feel the important thing is to treat their opinion as valid. Often when you investigate why people believe irrational things, you find that they believe them for rational reasons. People they respect believe that, they have personal experience that runs counter to the research, they distrust the source of the claim.
If you don't understand why someone believes something, you can't change their mind about it.
/rant
Sorry for the wall of text, this is something I deal with all the time. tl;dr: Change people's minds one person, one opinion at a time. Be patient and open minded. Research it with them, and make sure you are cooperating, not verbally fighting for dominance. Changing someone's mind is an incremental process. Emphasize being open minded and doing research instead of advocating "not believing crazy things".
If you don't like his solution, then you find a better one and sell it the people who are buying Trump's.
But most importantly, before we build another product to sell, we have to understand the problem. Get out of our ivory tower and understand the plight some people are experiencing.
In general I think that mass relocations of any kind for any reason are bad and should be throttled to sustainable throughput. This way churches, schools, hospitals and what not can keep up.
Senators used to be appointed. Party candidates used to be selected by party officials, not the public. This last one in particular would have prevented a Trump presidency.
Andrew Sullivan explains all this very well here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny...
The summary is that too much democracy leads to tyranny.
Electoral college rules in fact subtly break democracy even now. Wanted to vote, say, Bernie Sanders? Tough luck.
I think this entire argument reduces to a recommendation: "Humble yourself". It's so damn easy to get caught up in egocentrism. There's an intrinsic human bias towards believing that what you believe is the right thing to believe. I've never met someone who is genuinely innocent of this fault (if it can be called a fault), especially when it comes to dogmatic issues of genuine belief. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to exist as a creature that does not put its own beliefs first, of course, so I think the logic instead has to be, "yes, we may believe our own beliefs foremost, at the expense of the beliefs of others. But we must commit time to hypothetical sympathy".
To participate in an argument, we must engage in hypothetical sympathy with our counterparts. The first assumption on hearing what is perceived to be a wrong idea cannot be, "this idea is wrong, and therefore the carrier of this idea must be stupid and inferior to me, the right and correct". That turns an issue that might be argued productively into an issue of dogmatism. Most people are rational, to a functional extent. The difference lies more in the set of axioms we possess, rather than the logic used to build from them. And so we must humble ourselves; our axioms are unproveable by the definition of the word. The first step to engaging someone else is to try and imagine what set of axioms, assuming similar logic, would allow them to reach the positions they hold.
---
I will note as a postscript that of course, there is a strong counterargument to this position: that there's no time for this bullshit. In an austere ivory tower, perhaps we could be humble all day, but as it stands in the real world, the lives of humans are finite, and the beliefs of some inflict real suffering. And so, most of the time it's impossible to justify this kind of gentle work towards mutual understanding. This is the perspective of arguing for the Human instead of Humanity. I don't have a good response to this other than, "damn, that's a hard one". And so, sometimes, wars are fought. I will never support their necessity, but I am sympathetic to their causes.
He's about as partisan as you can get.
Somehow the idea of being concerned about the outcome for ordinary people has become vilified by American liberals because red state, blue collar, ordinary people are worthless.
What is going on?! Trump wants to be a job protectionist while Democrats want globalization? Aren't you people aware that not that long ago the Democrats were fighting the Republicans against globalization because they claimed that globalization was only good for corporate interests and bad for ordinary Americans?
PS I think Trump is a nut job in many ways so please don't read the above as an endorsement.
In this case, Trump rode the anger of voters who want to close the borders to both immigrants and imported manufactured goods, because they perceived that some of their jobs going to illegal imigrants, and other manufacturing jobs had been taken overseas.
How many of those people, do you think, buy everything at Walmart (whether it's all they can afford or not)? How many of those people realize that a 35% border tax and getting rid of our internal slave labor force will lead to commensurately higher prices of goods and services, without necessarily bringing back the jobs that were actually automated away? If they have thought it through, where's the better outcome?
This is why we don't have a direct democracy. These issues are more complicated than one can wrap their head around without making it a full-time job for an industry, and the decisions aren't helped by folks making decisions out of anger and desperation.
Populism by definition is closer to being synonymous with a functioning democracy that it is to mob rule.
Looking for symmetric universal moral principals sort of does seem to. Though I admit basically no form of government seems to head in that direction, as founding documents post-revolution are not really a form of government in my model.
"Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship."
Politics needs to be added. What a fucking joke. Someone regex the submissions.