1/6/20: U.S. political culture and mass protests: "Russia-gate" Season X, Episode Z

The U.S. media has been quick in accusing Russia of stirring the current wave of violence that is sweeping across the U.S. cities. As daft as it may sound, Russia has now been effectively elevated to the national cause of every malaise in many major U.S. media outlets. As quipped on Twitter by Seva Gunitsky, politics professor at University of Toronto,

Well, the problem, of course is that the U.S. leads the rest of the advanced economies in domestic political violence in recent years.

The above chart comes from Samuel J. Brannen Christian S. Haig Katherine Schmidt "The Age of Mass Protests: Understanding an Escalating Global Trend", Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2020. Note that Europe in the above includes countries that are outside the EU27, such as Russia and Ukraine. The entire continent of Europe has consistently fewer anti-government protests than North America, which includes Mexico and Canada. North American data here is heavily dominated by the U.S.

And this is not a new phenomena. Police brutality and racism, racially-based violence and violent protests are not new for the U.S., and all of these events predate the existence of Russia as an independent state, as established here: http://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/united-states-political-violence-database/. The full paper is here: http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf.

26/10/18: De-democratization of our values?

Do you, my friends love that smell of napalm in the mornings? Does it fill you with confidence about the future - your own and that of the rest of the world? For if you do answer 'Yes' to both of these questions, congratulations: you've made it into the American values (on average).

Here is the data from Pew Research on public trust in institutions:

Source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/18/most-americans-trust-the-military-and-scientists-to-act-in-the-publics-interest/ft_16-10-18_trustinstitutions_overview/.

Democratic cornerstones of political leadership and the media are trusted by less than 50 percent of the Americans, 27 percent to 41 percent. Command & control institution of the military is trusted by 79 percent. Scepticism over coercive power and centralized counter-democratic system based on rank-command trumps all the softy stuff. even educators are more trusted in the settings involving more deterministic decision-making (e.g. medical sciences and sciences) than in more polemical setting (e.g. general education).

But if you thought European are all softy-dofty democratically minded, think again. In fact, there is not much of difference between the American population and the European ones on the same topic:

Source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/04/trust-in-the-military-exceeds-trust-in-other-institutions-in-western-europe-and-u-s/.

Yes, yes, I hear you, the choir of Patriots: but in a democratic society, military is subject to democratic checks and balances, so why is this degree of confidence in military a matter for concern?

Let me explain why:

• Firstly, irrespective of the democratic or other checks and balances, military is not a pluralist institution that encourages debates, inquiries, and discoveries through dissent. In other words, while military may be framed into the broader democratic constraints, it cannot by itself be a genuinely democratic institution. There is no democracy in command systems. 
• Secondly, to anyone pontificating on democratic checks and balances, may I suggest revisiting the entire modern history of the U.S. to identify exactly at what point in time did democratic checks and balances imposed onto military do their jobs before the damages were incurred? In Vietnam? Nope. In multiple military engagements in Latin America? Nope, again. In the Balkans? Not really. In Afghanistan or Iraq? Not at all. 

Thus, in real terms, checks and balances do not define a democratic set of values that put strong public preference in favour of the military ahead of much weaker preferences in favour of the immediate democratic and pluralist institutions, such as politics, media, business, education.

What is happening, thus, as revealed by the above data, is the strong drift in public preferences away from democratic and liberal foundations of our modern states and toward more command and control, more coercive power-based institutions, such as military. To paraphrase one semi-failed leader of the past: it's public values de-democratization, stupid.

17/6/16: Forget Brexit. Think EUrisis

Swedish research institute, Timbro, published their report covering the rise of political populism in Europe. And it makes for a sobering reading.

Quoting from the report:

“Never before have populist parties had as strong support throughout Europe as they do today. On average a fifth of all European voters now vote for a left-wing or right-wing populist party. The voter demand for populism has increased steadily since the millennium shift all across Europe.”

Personally, I don’t think this is reflective of the voter demand for populism, but rather lack of supply of pragmatic voter-representing leadership anywhere near the statist political Centre. After decades of devolution of ethics and decision-making to narrow groups or sub-strata of technocrats - a process embodied by the EU systems, but also present at the national levels - European voters no longer see a tangible connection between themselves (the governed) and those who lead them (the governors). The Global Financial Crisis and subsequent Great Recession, accompanied by the Sovereign Debt Crisis and culminating (to-date) in the Refugees Crisis, all have exposed the cartel-like nature of the corporatist systems in Europe (and increasingly also outside Europe, including the U.S.). Modern media spread the information like forest fire spreads ambers, resulting in amplified rend toward discontent.

Again, per Timbro:
“No single country is clearly going against the stream. 2015 was the most successful year so far for populist parties and consistent polls show that right-wing populist parties have grown significantly as a result of the 2015 refugee crisis. So far this year left-wing or right-wing populist parties have been successful in parliamentary elections in Slovakia, Ireland, Serbia, and Cyprus, in a presidential election in Austria and in regional elections in Germany. A growing number of populist parties are also succeeding in translating voter demand into political influence. Today, populist parties are represented in the governments of nine European countries and act as parliamentary support in another two.”

Net: “…one third of the governments of Europe are constituted by or dependent on populist parties.”

And the direction of this trend toward greater populism in European politics is quite astonishing. Per Timbro, “discussions on populism too often focus only on rightwing populism. Practically everything written on populism, at least outside Southern Europe, is almost entirely concerned with right-wing populism. Within the political sciences the study of right-wing populist parties has even become its own field of study, while studies on leftwing populism are rare.”

This skew in reporting and analysis, however, is false: while “…it is the right-wing populism that has grown most notably, particularly in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. However, in Southern Europe the situation is the opposite. If the goal is to safeguard the core values and institutions of liberal democracy we need a parallel focus on those who challenge it, regardless of whether they come from the right or the left. It is seriously worrying that seven per cent of the population in Greece vote for
a Nazi party, but it is also worrying that five per cent vote for a Stalinist one. The second aim of this report is therefore to present an overview of the threat of populism, both right-wing and left-wing, against liberal democracy.”

Here are some trends:

The chart above shows that authoritarian left politics are showing a strong trend up from 2010 through 2014, with some moderation in 2015, which might be driven more by the electoral cycle, rather than by a potential change in the trend. The moderation in 2015, however, is not present in data for right wing authoritarianism:

So total support for authoritarian parties is up, a trend present since 2000 and reflective of the timing that is more consistent with the introduction of the euro and subsequent EU enlargements. An entirely new stage of increase in authoritarianism tendencies was recorded in 2015 compared to 2014.

Save for the correction downward in 2007-2009 period, authoritarian parties have been on an increasing power trend since roughly 1990, with renewed upward momentum from 1999.

You can read the full study and reference the study definitions and methodologies here: http://timbro.se/sites/timbro.se/files/files/reports/4_rapport_populismindex_eng_0.pdf.


What we are witnessing in the above trends is continuation of a long-running theme: the backlash by the voters, increasingly of younger demographics, against the status quo regime of narrow elites. Yes, this reality does coincide with economic inequality debates and with economic disruptions that made life of tens of millions of Europeans less palatable than before. But no, this is not a reaction to the economic crisis. Rather, it is a reaction to the social, ideological and ethical vacuum that is fully consistent with the technocratic system of governance, where values are being displaced by legal and regulatory rules, and where engineered socio-economic system become more stressed and more fragile as risks mount due to the technocratic obsession with… well… technocracy as a solution for every ill.

While the EU has been navel gazing about the need for addressing the democratic deficit, the disease of corporatism has spread so extensively that simply re-jigging existent institutions (giving more power to the EU Parliament and/or increasing member states’ voice in decision making and/or imposing robust checks and balances on the Commission, the Eurogroup and the Council) at this stage will amount to nothing more than applying plasters to the through-the-abdomen gunshot wound. Brexit or not, the EU is rapidly heading for the point of no return, where any reforms, no matter how structurally sound they might be, will not be enough to reverse the electoral momentum.

For those of us, who do think united Europe can be, at least in theory, a good thing, time is to wake up. Now. And not to oppose Brexit and similar movements, but to design a mechanism to prevent them by re-enfranchising real people into political decision making institutions.