There are a lot of nuanced connections to the populist uprising we are seeing throughout the West, but the core of the catalyst is the accumulated negative impacts to the non-elite class caused by globalism.
See the massive explosion in China's economy as the West educated its engineers and scientists, and gave away its industry to fatten Wall Street returns. In addition to the giant sucking sound of working-class jobs, it enabled massive corporate consolidation as the larger firms participating in the global game, would gobble up their smaller domestic competitors while also lobbying to push more small-business killing regulations. Then the establishments throws salt on those working class economic wounds with massive immigration.
The argument from the globalists used to be that consumers get cheaper goods. And yes, Walmart was stacked with cheap Chinese products. But with Biden inflation and high consumer interest rates, that benefit is over too.
What we are seeing is an end to the Global Order with US-funded protection of ocean freight and Wall Street run economic policies... both enabling communist countries like China to gorge at the economic trough at the expense of all but the top 10% income brackets of Western countries.
The populist uprising is basically a "no mas" movement against the globalists.
I don't think you can discount the technological component at work, though. The tensions you are talking about have been around since Perot--the true catalytic agent that turned them into a mass movement is the most recent round of technological transformations.
More specifically, the ascent of these populist movements runs parallel to the ascent of modern social media platforms, which are fundamentally designed, and whose business model runs off of, the stoking of paranoia and tribalistic tensions. They have displaced the 'classical' commodity-based economy with an attention economy, where the loudest, angriest and most tribalistic voices are promoted at the expense of cooperative and moderate voices. The COVID lockdowns sent this into overdrive by making these platforms essentially the central mode of political communication across the world.
There is something broader going on underneath that, however, which is that the nature of labor is changing: the industrial machine, which monetizes 'time spent working on a machine-assisted task' in the form of wages, no longer runs the economy. What runs the economy is the digital machine, and what the digital machine monetizes is data, not labor-time. Data is fundamentally work--it is created by the productive activity of people. But we have not developed institutions to *pay* people for their data, so workers are not benefitting from the post-industrial technological revolution. (which fostered the globalization we're seeing backlashes against) In the industrial era, we developed wages, and institutions like unions, pensions, etc. to support wage labor--and this allowed a portion of the value monetized by the industrial machine to be returned to workers, to raise their living standards and allow for functional markets where they could buy the products they helped produce.
We don't have systems like that yet to support the new form of labor, and what's worse, the barons of this post-industrial Gilded Age--Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc.--are trying to obscure what's happening, because they reap tremendous benefits from harvesting and monetizing people's data for free. They're already prepping for the next stage, which will be to push the line that "laborers aren't needed because AI can do everything so let's just pay labor to go away by implementing UBI", ignoring the fact that all AI really is is a bunch of computers running vast amounts of data--mostly *personal* data--through statistical algorithms. And that will create political instability on a scale far, far worse than we already have. I fear that's what it will take to acknowledge the importance of the layman's right to own his digital labor.
The book Beggars in Spain is a good representation of your last paragraph.
The world is still making real products that people need. Automation has replaced and will continue to replace manual labor, but the day when robots do all our manual labor are decades away. We should make more of our own products servicing our domestic needs. The US has a near $1 trillion per year trade deficit.
We might need public policy that retains jobs over automation. People need to work. As you point out, UBI isn't going to work.
I think the tech has been exploited by the globalists to deflect the people into conflict against each other to prevent the populist uprising over the unfairness of three guys at the top raking it in while the rest fall further and further behind.
The rise of the populist Right isn't a revolt against the Left, though they have little use for the Left. It is a revolt against the establishment Right who have proved ineffective at countering or even oblivious to the Left's march through the institutions. Some like the Tories or the CDU are even part of the center-left rather than the usual description of center-right. 5
This Substack is really based on a similar phenomena on the Left. The Groups and those allied with them have become the Establishment and the more traditional liberals are in revolt against them. It is confusing because the more traditional liberals were once the Establishment but have lost the internal battle and now are the counter-establishment.
There is room for populist fusion, at least in the US. Since Trump is famously transactional and the same is true of many others on the populist Right, they are potential partners with either faction on the Left depending on whether the battlegrounds of the future are cultural or economic. Combination of either faction of the Left and the populist Right creates an unbeatable coalition with the clear losers being the establishment Right and which ever faction on the Left won't deal.
Excellent post! The second paragraph offers more insight than I have seen previously into the confusing switches of the establishment liberals to the counter-establishment side. Many of the boomers among us, including myself, started out as anti-establishment radicals, so have come round full circle. Having previously been one of the minority who were up against the leviathan, I am less bothered than some about that being the case again.
Good presentation of the situation and hopefully economies and rational thinking will bring on a period of reasonable progression of common sense in government and our lives.
It hasn't peaked for this voter. I feel validated by Trump's victory, and more eager than ever to to fight wokeness- for the future of American and the world!
Trump will fulfill all his promises. He fulfill l ed most Las time with total opposition and this time he has support. If I'm Democrats, I'm looking at 28 as 1988, Except J. D. Vance is now GHWB. He's Trump II.
There are a lot of nuanced connections to the populist uprising we are seeing throughout the West, but the core of the catalyst is the accumulated negative impacts to the non-elite class caused by globalism.
See the massive explosion in China's economy as the West educated its engineers and scientists, and gave away its industry to fatten Wall Street returns. In addition to the giant sucking sound of working-class jobs, it enabled massive corporate consolidation as the larger firms participating in the global game, would gobble up their smaller domestic competitors while also lobbying to push more small-business killing regulations. Then the establishments throws salt on those working class economic wounds with massive immigration.
The argument from the globalists used to be that consumers get cheaper goods. And yes, Walmart was stacked with cheap Chinese products. But with Biden inflation and high consumer interest rates, that benefit is over too.
What we are seeing is an end to the Global Order with US-funded protection of ocean freight and Wall Street run economic policies... both enabling communist countries like China to gorge at the economic trough at the expense of all but the top 10% income brackets of Western countries.
The populist uprising is basically a "no mas" movement against the globalists.
I don't think you can discount the technological component at work, though. The tensions you are talking about have been around since Perot--the true catalytic agent that turned them into a mass movement is the most recent round of technological transformations.
More specifically, the ascent of these populist movements runs parallel to the ascent of modern social media platforms, which are fundamentally designed, and whose business model runs off of, the stoking of paranoia and tribalistic tensions. They have displaced the 'classical' commodity-based economy with an attention economy, where the loudest, angriest and most tribalistic voices are promoted at the expense of cooperative and moderate voices. The COVID lockdowns sent this into overdrive by making these platforms essentially the central mode of political communication across the world.
There is something broader going on underneath that, however, which is that the nature of labor is changing: the industrial machine, which monetizes 'time spent working on a machine-assisted task' in the form of wages, no longer runs the economy. What runs the economy is the digital machine, and what the digital machine monetizes is data, not labor-time. Data is fundamentally work--it is created by the productive activity of people. But we have not developed institutions to *pay* people for their data, so workers are not benefitting from the post-industrial technological revolution. (which fostered the globalization we're seeing backlashes against) In the industrial era, we developed wages, and institutions like unions, pensions, etc. to support wage labor--and this allowed a portion of the value monetized by the industrial machine to be returned to workers, to raise their living standards and allow for functional markets where they could buy the products they helped produce.
We don't have systems like that yet to support the new form of labor, and what's worse, the barons of this post-industrial Gilded Age--Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc.--are trying to obscure what's happening, because they reap tremendous benefits from harvesting and monetizing people's data for free. They're already prepping for the next stage, which will be to push the line that "laborers aren't needed because AI can do everything so let's just pay labor to go away by implementing UBI", ignoring the fact that all AI really is is a bunch of computers running vast amounts of data--mostly *personal* data--through statistical algorithms. And that will create political instability on a scale far, far worse than we already have. I fear that's what it will take to acknowledge the importance of the layman's right to own his digital labor.
The book Beggars in Spain is a good representation of your last paragraph.
The world is still making real products that people need. Automation has replaced and will continue to replace manual labor, but the day when robots do all our manual labor are decades away. We should make more of our own products servicing our domestic needs. The US has a near $1 trillion per year trade deficit.
We might need public policy that retains jobs over automation. People need to work. As you point out, UBI isn't going to work.
I think the tech has been exploited by the globalists to deflect the people into conflict against each other to prevent the populist uprising over the unfairness of three guys at the top raking it in while the rest fall further and further behind.
The rise of the populist Right isn't a revolt against the Left, though they have little use for the Left. It is a revolt against the establishment Right who have proved ineffective at countering or even oblivious to the Left's march through the institutions. Some like the Tories or the CDU are even part of the center-left rather than the usual description of center-right. 5
This Substack is really based on a similar phenomena on the Left. The Groups and those allied with them have become the Establishment and the more traditional liberals are in revolt against them. It is confusing because the more traditional liberals were once the Establishment but have lost the internal battle and now are the counter-establishment.
There is room for populist fusion, at least in the US. Since Trump is famously transactional and the same is true of many others on the populist Right, they are potential partners with either faction on the Left depending on whether the battlegrounds of the future are cultural or economic. Combination of either faction of the Left and the populist Right creates an unbeatable coalition with the clear losers being the establishment Right and which ever faction on the Left won't deal.
Excellent post! The second paragraph offers more insight than I have seen previously into the confusing switches of the establishment liberals to the counter-establishment side. Many of the boomers among us, including myself, started out as anti-establishment radicals, so have come round full circle. Having previously been one of the minority who were up against the leviathan, I am less bothered than some about that being the case again.
Also my trajectory. Started in politics as antiwar and here I am again.
Good presentation of the situation and hopefully economies and rational thinking will bring on a period of reasonable progression of common sense in government and our lives.
Another well rounded thoughtful article from the Liberal Patriot. Thanks!!!
It hasn't peaked for this voter. I feel validated by Trump's victory, and more eager than ever to to fight wokeness- for the future of American and the world!
Trump will fulfill all his promises. He fulfill l ed most Las time with total opposition and this time he has support. If I'm Democrats, I'm looking at 28 as 1988, Except J. D. Vance is now GHWB. He's Trump II.
If he does deliver, and it's perceived that way by non-Trump diehards, you're probably correct.