Media radicalisation in the US and UK

 

Perhaps many people outside the United States do not realise how dangerous the attack on the United States Capitol was. The views from outside the Capitol, which is all the media could immediately show, seemed harmless enough. The reality was very different. Five people died, including one policeman. As one Republican described, seeing the faces of those trying to force their way through a police barricade to get into the House Chamber

“I saw this crowd of people banging on that glass screaming. Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm. What I saw in front of me was basically home-grown fascism, out of control.”

We now know that this was a well organised attempt to capture leading politicians. We don’t yet know, as some Democrats have alleged, whether the attackers had inside help from some Republican politicians. What we do know is that the attackers believed that the elections had been stolen from them, and these claims were repeated and acted on by a majority of the Republican politicians even after the Capitol attack. As there is not a shred of evidence that Biden’s election was illegitimate, those Republican members of Congress are guilty of supporting a democratic destroying lie that was behind the attack on Congress.

There are a minority among Republican politicians that would like to break from Trump. Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, said

“There’s no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame”.

But only 10 Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, while the remaining 201 abstained or voted against. It is very unlikely that enough Republican senators will find him guilty in the Senate. A key question is why.

It should be in the interests of Republicans to impeach Trump, because that is the only certain way to stop him running again in 2024. Republicans shouldn’t want Trump to run again because his behaviour has put off a minority of Republican voters. That was true before the election (Trump did worse than the party in Senate and House races) and it is even more true as a result of his behaviour since. The two seats in Georgia, which looked like going Republican, voted Democrat after the events at the Capitol and Trump campaigned there. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol many Republican politicians disowned Trump.

But then the Republican base fought back. The reason why Republican politicians will not impeach him is the support he still enjoys among Republican voters, and particularly Republican activists. 64% of Republicans support Trump’s recent behaviour, and 57% want him to run again in 2024. As many Republican voters approved the attack on the Capitol as opposed it. There is a history of extreme Republican candidates defeating moderate candidates in primaries, so few Republicans want to upset the Republican base by opposing Trump, even after the attack on the Capitol. Trump himself is ready to finance campaigns against his critics in the Republican party.

So the Republican party are trapped by their pro-Trump base, and there is no obvious way out for those who oppose Trump. The Republican party therefore remains the party that does not respect democracy. A key question for the future of democracy in the United States will be whether voters understand that when they vote in two and four years time. Do they understand that a vote for the Republicans could be the last time they get a real choice in who governs them? As I argued some time ago, the only way you can rescue right wing political parties from the extreme place they have got to in the US and UK is to defeat them time and time again, or to change what is keeping extremism going.

Academic analysis of how the media influences people has normally focused on elections, and all of the studies I have seen suggest a strong influence on voters. I think their influence on party activists on the right is just as important. The traditional and respectable media in the US was clear that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, and that Biden won fairly. It was the extreme right wing media, including Murdoch’s Fox News but also One America News, Rush Limbaugh and numerous social media outlets, that pushed the idea that Trump had really won.

This media is crucial in allowing many Republicans to believe what Trump was telling them. I think this is the key difference between now and when the last Republican president was impeached. For a long time voters were reluctant to have Nixon impeached, but eventually they agreed it should be done. But back then there was no significant media pretending it was all a giant conspiracy. Back then there were no significant people or organisations with money threatening to bring down any politicians who voted to have Nixon impeached.

I doubt if Biden has the votes to curtail the ability of Fox News and others to continue to radicalise the Republican base, even if he was minded to do so. We therefore have to hope that voters will continue to vote against this Republican party. The danger is that the mainstream media begins to normalise the Republican party once again, and a President with a Senate that blocks many of his reforms finds his popularity falling, and ends up in the position Obama was for six of his eight years.

In the UK we do not have primaries, so the direct power of the Conservative Party base is much less. The way the authoritarian right was able to win power in the UK was through a new party of the right that threatened the hegemony of the Conservative party, and through a referendum. Yet voters still had to be convinced to vote for a Prime Minister that illegally suspended parliament. That happened in part because the media landscape in the UK is much worse than in the US. I thought otherwise when I first started this blog, but that was before the Conservative party started turning the screws on the BBC. While in the US both the Trump supporting press and broadcast media are in a minority, in the UK the right wing press is a majority of the printed media and the BBC finds it difficult to deviate from the lines pushed by the government and that press.

However the situation in the UK may be about to get a lot worse, with GB News headed by Andrew Neil and the Murdoch owned News UK TV. Both new channels look like they are pitching to a right wing audience, and both are funded by people or organisations that have funded other right wing endeavours. Ofcom is supposed to ensure balance in broadcasting, which is why Sky News has never become Fox News. But with comment rather than news outlets like LBC and Talk Radio, Ofcom has taken a less strict view about what balance is.

The danger is that the two new TV channels will try and push that boundary further to the right. This is the context in which totally unfit Paul Dacre’s rumoured chairmanship of Ofcom should be seen. The danger is the creation of a right wing media bubble, where people who read the right wing press do not watch BBC News but one of these two new channels. Coupled with a FPTP system which favours social conservatives, and a Conservative party that exploits that and a social liberal vote which is divided among many parties, if these new media outlets are successful such a right wing bubble could ensure Conservative governments for a very long time.

Will UK voters really vote for the Republican party and our own Donald Trump?

There is so much about today’s Conservative party that is very similar to the Republican party in the US. To establish this, there is no better place to start than our future Prime Minister for the next five years, if polls are to be believed.

Trump and Johnson are both inveterate liars. They lie when they have no need to, just for effect. To take some recent examples. He told Andrew Marr that the Tories don't do deals with other parties, when everyone can remember the Coalition government and the DUP. (Marr, as so often with interviewers, let that pass.) Johnson has said that the extra money he has allowed for the health service is the biggest boost for a generation. In fact it is smaller than the increase in spending from Labour from 2004 onwards. There are many like this. He has lied all his life, and been sacked from jobs twice for doing so. He lies about lying! No UK politician in living memory has lied like this.

A consequence of that is you cannot trust a word he says. When he and his ministers say that the NHS will not be part of any trade negotiations with the US, it means nothing. Brexit puts the UK in a very weak position because the political costs of walking away, while the costs for the US are zero. So of course the NHS and things that affect the NHS will be part of any trade deal.

When he says that he will get a trade deal with the EU in just a year he is lying. It is just not possible given the reasons the Conservatives want to leave the EU. So voters will have to decide which lie he will choose: to break his undertaking not to extend the transition period or to leave with no deal.

Like Trump, Johnson treats the economy, and the consequent wellbeing of everyone in it, as a plaything for his own ends. With Trump this involves imposing tariffs because of his 15th century understanding of economics. With Johnson he chose Brexit on a toss up about what would advance his own ambitions. He then championed the hardest of Brexits because it appealed to those who would vote him leader of his party. But there is a difference: Brexit is far more harmful than anything Trump has managed.

Where Trump wants to increase coal production in the US, Johnson wants to stop any increases in fuel duty. Johnson didn’t attend a leaders debate on climate change.

Johnson, like Trump, is totally lacking in empathy for others, and is only interested in himself. Johnson thought nothing of helping a friend beat up a journalist. His personal life matters because it reflects the kind of person he is.

Like Trump, he has no time or respect for people who disagree with him. He shut down parliament because it was getting in his way. In his manifesto he now threatens to curtail the ability of the law to stop him doing what he and his party want. Johnson and the Conservatives, like Trump and the Republicans, are a threat to democracy.

Like Trump, he and his party want a totally compliant media. They have put so much pressure on the BBC that parts of it now do what they can to flatter Johnson and the Conservative cause. They have threatened Channel4 because they put a block of ice in his place when he failed to turn up to that leaders debate on climate change.

Like Trump, Johnson hates scrutiny. They both would much rather talk to an adoring party faithful than take part in critical questioning. In this election, Johnson has avoided questions from the press as much as he can, has avoided debates, and is avoiding an interview with one of the best interviewers around.

One reason they both hate scrutiny is their inability to concentrate on the details, the kind of details he got wrong such that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe remains in jail. This is one reason they sent Gove rather than Johnson to do the climate change debate. Johnson is as mentally unsuitable to be Prime Minister as Trump is to be President.

Republicans in Congress with few exceptions defend Trump. Conservative MPs do the same for Johnson without exception, now that the few Conservatives with some attachment to One Nation Conservatism have been driven out of the party. The Republicans never pretend to govern for the whole country, but just for what some of them call Real America. The Conservatives with Brexit have adopted the same policy. A narrow victory for Leave, obtained in the most dubious referendum ever, has become a mandate for the hardest of Brexits, and with a referendum on the final deal ruled out.

Both parties adopt divide and rule tactics, yet play the nationalist card for all its worth. To conceal and distract from far right economic policies designed to help the 1% wealthiest in the population, by a party financed by the even wealthier, they focus on attracting votes from the xenophobic and racist. The Conservatives have seen off the threat from the Brexit party by adopting the Brexit party. It was probably the votes of ex-Brexit party members that helped secure Johnson his leadership.

The Republicans play the race card and the Tories play the immigration card, something they have done since the turn of this century. Once you do that, it is inevitable that you end up with a party leaders who are themselves racist. Whatever you think about Corbyn, it is Johnson who has expressed racial slurs like calling Muslim women letterboxes, talked about black people as 'piccaninnies' with 'watermelon smiles', Nigerians as money obsessed. (Not to mention his homophobic and sexist comments, and his description of working class men as drunk, criminal and feckless, and what he originally wrote about Hillsborough victims and single mothers.)

In the US Trump gets away with his behaviour among many because of his money and fame, and in the UK Johnson gets away with it among many because of his class and jokes. Both are where they are because they were given huge head starts, Trump through inheritance and Johnson through class, and have subsequently had careers which are dotted with failure. But once you see beyond the fame and jokes, they are both authoritarians who see nothing wrong in stoking fears about minorities to get the majority to vote for them, and in abusing the constitution to get their way. You might say that it is Trump not Johnson who is threatened with impeachment, but I have lost count of the legal cases about his actions that have been conveniently postponed for this election.

What too many commentators on this election fail to see is the potential irreversibility of this decline into right wing authoritarian rule. With most newspapers pushing out propaganda for the Conservatives and the BBC successfully tamed, the Conservatives now have a sufficient block to any real scrutiny of their policies or behaviour. In the next five years their manifesto suggests they hope to tame anyone else who gets in their way.

The Conservatives have ensured that enough people in this country see and read want they want them to see and read. Soon we will see attempts to introduce nationwide voter ID simply because it helps the Conservatives. It is wishful thinking to say ‘if only we had another Labour leader they would be miles ahead’ - just remember Ed Miliband who lost an election because the media conveniently decided austerity was good economics. [1]

Next year the people of the United States will have their chance to get rid of the worst US president in living memory. We have the chance to stop our own Trump, Boris Johnson, before he gets five years in which he could do irreversible harm to our economy, our democracy, our union and our civil society. The danger in both countries is that they keep their Trump/Johnson, and get locked into permanent authoritarian right wing rule similar to what we see in Hungary and Poland.

Alarmist? Johnson shut down parliament to get his way! When Brexit fails to be the promised land Johnson has promised and when the UK’s potential fails to be unleashed, who will the Conservatives blame for their own failure? How much will they give away to get a US trade deal? Johnson, like Trump, is in the words of a BBC interviewer in braver times a ‘nasty piece of work’, whose only interest is in helping himself. It says a lot about what the UK has become that he looks like getting elected to be Prime Minister.

[1] Of course there were other reasons Miliband lost. He was unpopular, like every Labour leader over the past 40 years has been unpopular except the one who did a deal with the Tory press. And in the final days he was said to be in the pocket of Alex Salmond, even though the SNP have said they will never put a Tory PM into power so their bargaining strength is zero. The broadcast media went with the Tory's SNP story rather than Labour highlighting the (we now know very real) threat to the NHS. 

If the Tories lose an election before we leave, Brexit is unlikely to happen.

There is more talk of a general election, although of course that does not mean it will happen. In that context I frequently hear people say that a general election would do nothing to get the country out of the huge Brexit hole it has dug itself. I strongly disagree. If there is an election before we leave the EU and if Labour formed the next government, I think it would make a huge difference. Unless Labour win so many seats that it has a massive majority, I think the chances are that Brexit would just not happen at all.

Let us suppose that Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer manage to negotiate some form of soft Brexit with the EU. The crucial question to then ask is what the attitude of the Conservative opposition would be. As a result of losing the election (if not before) they will have a new leader, and given the attitude of most Conservative members that leader is likely to be a Brexiter. As the Brexiters in the current party find it hard to accept the hard Brexit proposed by Theresa May, they will almost certainly oppose any soft Brexit negotiated by Labour. Brexiters are happiest when complaining, and so the line they will probably take about any Corbyn Brexit deal is that it represents a betrayal of the ‘will of the people’.

Another reason that they will oppose Labour’s soft Brexit is that they do not want Labour to be able to do something the Conservatives were unable to do. It would be the ultimate humiliation that a party that is increasingly defined as being the Brexit party could not negotiate Brexit, yet a Labour government could.

The Conservative party is increasingly looking like the Republican party in the US, with an activist and very right wing base fired up by Murdoch owned and other partisan media. The health care programme that Obama successfully introduced was very similar to something the Republican senator and presidential candidate Mitt Romney had passed in Massachusetts in 2006. Despite this the Republicans in opposition unequivocally rejected Obama’s similar reforms and fought them with all their might.

Some more moderate Conservative MPs might be tempted to support Labour because they themselves would be quite happy with a soft Brexit. They could quite plausibly argue that their aim should be to get Brexit over the line and a future Conservative government could distance the UK further from the EU. But something we have learnt over the last few years is that Tory Brexit policy has been strongly influenced by the Brexiters, and the rest of the party is extremely reluctant to break the party line. Furthermore many Tory Remainers may be happy to see Brexit fail. As a result, Corbyn cannot count on rebel Tories coming to his aid.

The final reason the Conservatives, and their supporters in the press, will not want to assist Labour in delivering Brexit is that they will scent the chance of embarrassing the new government. There are plenty of Labour MPs, backed up by many more Labour party members, who do not want to see Brexit at all, and they might vote against any agreement. In that situation the Liberal Democrats and SNP might also vote against. Shortly after an election where the Conservatives are still in shock they are extremely unlikely to help out a Labour government in difficulties.

With the Tories opposing any form of soft Brexit, Corbyn’s actions will be guided with what might happen if his Brexit plans were ever put to a referendum. Labour have now said they would hold a referendum on any deal they negotiated, and they would not be allowed to backtrack on this because a combination of Tories (yes, I know, but see above), smaller parties and Labour rebels would insist it be held. A People’s Vote under a Labour government will be a very different affair from anything held under the Tories. Tory politicians, and more importantly the Brexit press, would oppose it with all the vigour we have seen over the last few years. As so many Brexit supporters derive their devotion to the cause from the press they read, they are likely to follow that press in declaring Labour’s Brexit deal to be a betrayal. Of course Remainers would also oppose it. Labour would find both Remainers and many Brexiters campaigning against them. They would not have a chance, and Brexit would fail.

A Labour government trying to get a victory in a Brexit referendum looks like a lose lose option. They would fail to get a majority for their Brexit deal and be humiliated by the result. Once the Conservatives make their opposition clear, Labour should see this coming. But how do they avoid that outcome, as the clock will still be ticking on an extended Article 50? The issue cannot be kicked in to the long grass, and Labour will have a manifesto commitment to try and get a Brexit deal. One possibility is that after talking to other party leaders, Corbyn will announce that a Brexit deal is impossible because of Conservative and minor party intransigence and he will put to parliament that Article 50 should be revoked. That will be passed by a narrow majority (the Tories and perhaps a few Labour MPs would oppose). He will endure a day of negative headlines in the Brexit press, but just another day in a continuum of negative headlines is hardly a great cost. Most of the country will breath a large sigh of relief.

If this is the case, why would Labour promise to enact Brexit in their manifesto, if they could see it subsequently failing? For a start Labour could not be sure what the Conservative opposition would do, and it might hope to get a majority large enough to overcome its own rebel MPs. But the main reason is the same as it was in 2017. The party will want to avoid the election being about the merits or otherwise of Brexit. The Tories in an election will want to pin the blame for their failure to achieve Brexit on Labour, and if Labour switched to being a Remain party just before the election that tactic will probably be successful. Having come this far as a Brexit party, Labour will be on much firmer ground in an election if it continues to say it wants Brexit and has a better chance of succeeding than the Tories who have failed for three years.

Would it be ironic that a Labour government would fail to enact a form of Brexit because of Tory opposition? If you think about it, the Conservative government has failed to enact a form of Brexit laregely because of Tory opposition. The reason we are in this Brexit hole is that Brexiters who won a mandate for a soft Brexit then decided that only the hardest of Brexits would do. It would be poetic justice and good for the country if Brexit failed as a result.

The bankruptcy of the centre right: Brexit edition

If you want to see how the centre-right can lose out big time you just need to look at the US. Last week a Republican senator who had been critical of Trump lost to a Trump loyalist in a primary. Partisan voters prize loyalty, you may say, but this is loyalty to someone who lies all the time, and prefers the US’s traditional arch enemy Russia to its traditional allies. The US is just a few threads away from becoming yet another elected dictatorship. One of those threads is the Mueller investigation, and we will see if any Republican ‘rebels’ who want to impeach Trump are made of sterner stuff than the Brexit rebel Conservative MPs.

The story of neoliberal overreach is in part about how centre-right politicians set in place or promoted causes or institutions that would allow for the ascendency of the hard-right and then eventually their own demise. In the US this stretches from repealing the fairness doctrine, which led to hard-right talk radio and then Fox News, to increasing the role of money in elections and finally allowing Trump to win the presidency. In the UK it involved promoting austerity and an immigration target that was bound to fail, both of which directly led to Brexit.

Once these conditions have been set in place to win votes or shrink the state, there seem to be two stages in the process through which the centre-right concede power to the hard-right. The first stage is a belief that the centre-right are still in control when clearly they are not, or a blind optimism that the hard-right can be easily bought off. In the UK that is the stage where Cameron gave in to UKIP and newspaper pressure and agreed to a referendum on EU membrship. The centre-right make concessions to the hard-right to preserve party unity.

The second stage is where the hard-right have control, and play on this centre-right belief in party unity to prevent the centre-right from rocking the boat. [1] We saw this in the US under Obama when the Republicans scorned all the President’s overtures for bipartisanship. In the UK we are seeing it right now in how easily most Remain voting Conservative MPs are happy to go along with the current farce, and how easily the small band of rebels can be persuaded to cave.

The latter is due in part to our equivalent of Fox News conducting a hate campaign against these rebels. There is nothing subtle about this: try to vote against the government to prevent a national disaster and those big four right wing newspapers will headline on saying you are going against the will of the people and even imply you are a traitor. Whipping up this kind of hatred is no joke when followers of the ultra-right have already murdered one MP and tried to murder another. Yet before you start feeling some sympathy for the rebels subject to these newspapers attacks, remember these same centre-right Conservative MPs were quite happy to indulge the same papers by voting down Leveson 2.

It is also a result of the BBC increasingly shying away from anything that could be construed as critical of the government, and dumbing down political discussion. The rabid right wing press pretend that any form of dissent from the government’s chosen path of implementing Brexit is betraying the will of the people, confusing the government with the people just as authoritarian governments have always done, yet the BBC panders to the idea that these rebels are really trying to stop Brexit by constantly labelling the rebel MPs as Remainers.

As a result, Conservative MPs duly voted through substantial increases in executive power at the expense of parliament. There is now a grave danger that they will get played by the Brexiters. The Brexiters should by now know that any deal that can be done will be some form of soft Brexit, remaining in the Customs Union and Single Market for goods for sure. That is not the kind of divorce they wanted. They keep saying that the possibility of No Deal must be kept in play to increase our negotiating power, having conceded all our negotiating power by invoking Article 50 with no discussion and little plan. Perhaps the real reason is that they would not be at all unhappy that through their belligerence time for a deal disappears, and we get No Deal by default. Chris Grey calculates there are only 62 working days left to do a deal, and May is not even near the range of possible deals yet. If the Brexiters plan is to talk out a deal so we exit without one, it seems to be going very well.

For months I have been saying that No Deal would not happen because parliament would not let it happen. I still think it is unlikely, but as a result of the votes last week and the UK side in the Brexit negotiations going backwards since December I am much less confident than I was. The slide from a pluralist democracy to an elected dictatorship or a right wing plutocracy [2] is full of moments when sensible people say this could not possibly happen here.

[1] Contrast Conservatives voting on block to sweep aside the Lord’s amendments to the Labour rebellion over the EEA. Often the fact that Labour MPs have views for which they are quite prepared to vote against their leadership is seen as a political weakness, but what we are seeing right now is the Conservative desire for party unity as a colossal political weakness.

[2] Before anyone objects, of course this only applies to the UK on the single decision of Brexit, for now. But Brexit is perhaps the most important change in UK politics since the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the way this change has come about does show structural similarities to the transformation of the US Republican party that led to the election of Donald Trump.

A road to right wing authoritarian government

This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller's ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes

“In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a new constitution, weaken checks and balances, and radically reduce media pluralism. Instead, he presented himself as a competent mainstream Christian Democrat. In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) party went out of its way to stress its character as a reasonable conservative party which simply wanted to provide more benefits to families with children.“

The idea that most voters should see beyond the mask to understand who politicians really are is ridiculous. As the 2016 US general election showed, the information content of the broadcast media can be increasingly small.

Does Trump provide a counterexample of this, because he was an 'outsider' who was elected? I would say no for two reasons. First, the Republican party had played a large part in creating the political environment that allowed his populism to win votes. Second, the Republican party seems quite content to behave in ways which complement Trump's authoritarianism. (By attacking the CBO, for example.)

The message is that if you want to investigate populist regimes (using populist in the Müller sense) you need to look at political elites rather than the electorate. I think he is right. But what makes an elite adopt an authoritarian path? I am sure there are many answers to that question, but what I will try to do below (in no doubt a very 'untutored' way) is to show one route in what had been a pluralistic democracy by which elites from the right can move in a populist, authoritarian direction. I'm an economist, so I use a simple model.

Here is a two dimensional variation on the familiar left-right diagram. The additional dimension is sometimes called 'identity' or 'culture'. Let us assume that voters are evenly distributed inside the circle. (Not necessarily a good assumption: see here.) In a two party system you might expect both parties, if their main concern was to be elected, to adopt positions that put them close to the centre. This is because the party a voter will vote for is governed by the party that is nearest to them.

But suppose that a party wants to take a less centrist position, either because its backers wish this or because its politicians believe is some ideology. To be concrete, suppose the party of the right wants to adopt a very right wing economic policy that involves, for example, distributing income from most people to the very rich. In a one-dimensional left-right space such a party would be doomed. But suppose their opponents, for whatever reason, were fairly liberal. If we assume that the left is fairly moderate on economic issues, then that places the two parties at the position given by P in the diagram above. That leaves them evenly matched. (To see why, see below.).

The party on the right will want to focus on their socially conservative platform, while the party on the left will stress their more 'moderate' economic platform. This looks like a stable situation, which contains no threat to a pluralistic democracy. What could change to upset it? Here is just one possible route.

If the right has more influence on the media than the left, they can campaign on a platform that differs from the platform they intend to implement. If you can pretend that you are a moderate party on economic issues rather than an extreme right party, and this pretense works, then your party wins. So in terms of voter perception, the party on the right moves along the upper arrow from position P to C. The left party might respond in kind by pretending they are less liberal than they are, but because they have less media influence they cannot move so far from their true position. If we look at the campaign positions of the two parties, marked by C, it is intuitively clear that the right wing party wins any election. (The dotted lines show a proof – see [1])

We see this in the US with tax cuts (pushing the idea that lower corporation taxes will mainly raise wages), in the UK with austerity (which was really a policy to shrink the state much further than most wanted, dressed up as some kind of moralistic injunction that governments should be like households) and especially Brexit, where advocates pretended there would be no economic cost to leaving the EU. The counterpart of hiding a right wing position is to emphasise conservative issues. This is most obvious with the culture war in the US, together with the politics of race. In the UK the key social issue was immigration, which the Conservatives started focusing on from the late 1990s. (The great thing about immigration as an issue for the right is that it can be (falsely) given an economic dimension.) Again Brexit is an exemplar, with not just immigration ('protect our borders') but nationalism ('take back control').

While this results in short term gains for the right, as a tactic it is unstable in the longer term because governments once in power implement their real economic policies. We will move back from C to P on the lower arrow. Voters observe tax cuts for the better off at their expense, they observe the impact of austerity and, in the UK, they observe the consequences of Brexit. It may take some time, but right wing leaders know they are vulnerable to reality winning out over spin, so they may wish to take actions to offset the democratic consequences of being found out.

There are lots of directions this authoritarian turn can take. Taking greater control of the media, either directly by shutting down critical media or buying off media owners in exchange for support, is one direction we see taken in Hungary. Gerrymandering is favoured by Republicans in the US. Portraying opposition leaders as traitors is favoured in the UK. Ramping up nationalism and the 'threat' from immigration almost everywhere.

Politics that is exclusively along the social conservative/liberal axis can degenerate into a kind of identity politics where you just vote for your tribe. As Müller writes

“The problem starts when citizens view every issue purely as a matter of partisan identity, so that the credibility of climate science, for example, depends on whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. It gets worse when partisan identity becomes so strong that no arguments from or about the legitimacy of the other side ever get through.”

The path to authoritarianism I set out here is not meant to be the whole story, and is not meant to correspond with any particular country. What I hope it does illustrate is how an authoritarian government can emerge when a party adopts a very right wing economic policy, and pretends it has not. It happens without voters changing their views or preferences in any way. It is authoritarian populism that comes from the behaviour of right wing elites.

[1] To see which party wins (assuming my geometry is correct), draw a line between the two positions, and then draw a line at right angles that bisects it. Every voter on that line is indifferent (equidistant) between the two parties, and therefore every voter either side of the line votes for each party.

Do Trump’s deficits matter?

Should Democrats complain about the large deficits that Trump and the Republicans are creating? Or is this playing into the Republican narrative that made the stimulus in 2009 inadequate and gave us austerity from then onwards?

The answer that mainstream economics gives is straightforward. In a recession when interest rates have hit their lower bound [1] you do not worry about the deficit and you ignore those that do worry. Deficits should be whatever size is required to enable the economy to recover. Enough stimulus so that central banks feel they need to raise interest rates above their lower bound. Politicians failed to follow that advice during the last recession.

In contrast, when the economy is not in a recession, and interest rates are perfectly able to control aggregate demand, then deficits at a level where government debt starts rising may well be a problem. For various reasons, not least the chance of a recession, it is best to have deficits at a level which very gradually reduces the ratio of government debt to GDP, unless you have a good reason for doing otherwise.

There are many reasons why, outside of a recession, deficits that, if sustained, would steadily increase the debt to GDP ratio may be bad for the economy, but let me give the most obvious here. For a given level of government spending, interest on debt has to come out of taxes. The higher the debt, the higher the taxes. That is a problem because high taxes discourage people from working, and it is also unfair from an intergenerational point of view.

This last point is obvious if you think about it. The current generation could abolish taxes and pay for all spending, including any interest on debt, by borrowing more. That cannot go on forever, so at some point taxes have to rise again. A whole generation has avoided paying taxes, but at the cost of future generations paying even more.

As a result, unless there is a very good reason like a recession [2], a responsible government will not plan to sustain a deficit over time that raises the debt to GDP ratio. The problem though is that it is very tempting for a government not to be responsible. The current US government, which is essentially a plutocracy, wants above all else to cut taxes for the very wealthy, and if they do it without at the same time raising taxes on other people but instead by running a deficit they think they can get away with it. Democrats have every reason to say that is irresponsible, although of course the main thing they should focus on is that the last people who need a tax cut are the very rich.

Unfortunately being responsible can seem rather dull and boring, so it may be tempting to hype things up a bit by predicting some disaster that will come from rising deficits. That is not a good place to go, because you are crying wolf. Large deficits are like overeating. Do it once or twice and you will survive. Do it every day and you will die young. The only difference from overeating is that you do not die young, but your children do.

So much for mainstream economics. What about MMT, which is often characterised as implying that deficits do not matter? That is an incorrect characterisation: what MMT actually says is that inflation should determine what the deficit should be. If inflation looks like staying below target you can and should have a larger deficit, and vice versa. The reason they say that is that they think the central bank, in changing interest rates to control inflation, is wasting its time, because they believe rates do not have a predictable impact on demand and inflation. If that were true, then even mainstream economists would agree that the deficit should be at whatever level keeps inflation at target. The difference between MMT and the mainstream is whether the central bank is or is not wasting its time.

In an important sense, whichever perspective you take, thinking about stabilisation policy or long run deficits can just muddy the waters when it comes to the Republican tax cuts. The reason that Republicans mainly fund tax cuts for the very wealthy by borrowing is that it appears this is not costing anyone anything. If nobody’s taxes are going up, the argument goes, why should we mind too much if the richer get even richer. The key point to get across is this. There are two possibilities. The first is that if it is possible to permanently cut some taxes forever without raising others or cutting spending, why should the tax cut not go to those who need it rather than those who don’t. The second more likely possibility is that it is not sustainable, in which case at some point tax paid by ordinary people will go up or spending on ordinary people will be cut to pay for tax cuts to the very rich. Either way, ordinary people are losing out. To focus on deficits or inflation just detracts from this basic truth.

[1] The lower bound is either where the central bank thinks it is or the point that interest rate cuts become an unpredictable and therefore ineffective instrument.

[2] A natural rather than man made disaster might be another good reason to run deficits. Public investment on high return infrastructure is another.

The two types of populism within Brexit

When I read this by Hungarian academic Tamas Dezso Ziegler, I could not help thinking he had a point. The point, as I understand it, is that by calling people like Trump or Farage populist, when at the same time we call Syriza or Podemos populist, we are in danger of diminishing or normalising the danger the former pose. He suggests this wide definition of populism

“could be useful because there is not necessarily a moral evaluation behind it: if they would use far right demagoguery, or fascist politics, it would show something dangerous, extreme. It would ring the bell to us all. Populism does not do so.”

We could add that talking about “right populists” and “left populists” allows the academic to show a kind of balance.

There seem to me to be two definitions of populism. Dani Rodrik defines populism here as parties/politicians/movements with

“an anti-establishment orientation, a claim to speak for the people against the elites, opposition to liberal economics and globalisation, and often (but not always) a penchant for authoritarian governance.”

The problem I have with definitions like this is that they seem to be encompassing rather than natural. By this I mean that it includes things that do not obviously go together, but instead are chosen so that they encompass some list of political parties. Virtually every candidate for Congress in the US declares that they will ‘sort out Washington’, so appears anti-establishment and for the people rather than elites. In contrast, authoritarian governance is optional. What seems to be doing the work here is opposition to liberal economics and globalisation.

It seems to me that a quite different conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The others, be they immigrants or the 48%, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. And, critically in my view, populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of democracy if they believe they are frustrating what they perceive as the will of the people. The populist, if you accept Müller’s account, denies pluralism. They are naturally authoritarian, and so are happy to tear down the elements of a pluralist democracy. [1]

Thinking in terms of left or right tends to get in the way here. The more appropriate axis to thinking about this definition of populism is social liberalism and conservatism. A social liberal, almost by definition, is not going to attack democratic pluralism. Once we recognise that, we can see why parties of the right that use socially conservative policies to attract votes are particularly vulnerable to morphing into (or being taken over by) populists in the Müller sense. Indeed this is a point he himself makes, as I quote here.

It seems to me that Brexit can illustrate both types of populism. The definition of populism based on anti-globalisation might describe quite well the average Leave voter. The Leave voter tends to be against immigration, and as a result be prepared to roll back globalisation, and this often goes with a belief that the elite or establishment no longer listens to them. In contrast some of the prominent Brexiters, and certainly the newspapers that swung the referendum vote, are populists in Müller’s sense. They are quite happy to talk about the will of the people, and take away power from judges and parliament to ensure the will of the people as they see it prevails.

This is why I have considerable sympathy with the Hungarian academic who I quoted at the start of this post. Populists in the anti-globalisation sense may be a problem, depending on your view of globalisation and liberal economics, but they are not really dangerous for democracy. Populists of the kind Müller describes are, as our history tells us.

In the US, we are not just talking about Trump, but most of the Republican party: a party that appears to go to any length to preserve its gerrymandering of voting districts. In Hungary and Poland we have seen many attacks on pluralistic democracy justified by nationalism and racism. Both, like Russia or the far right in the US, are happy to scapegoat someone who happens to be a wealthy Jew as an enemy of the people for the crime of standing up for liberalism. That certain UK newspapers find common cause with these authoritarian regimes and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew on their front pages should be a wake-up call that these newspapers are no longer part of a pluralist democracy but have become instead its enemy.

[1] Tear down rather than reform. Of course when reform becomes destroy has to be judged, but in most cases that is not very difficult.

If we treat plutocracy as democracy, democracy dies

The snake-oil salesmen

There are many similarities between Brexit and Trump. They are both authoritarian movements, where authority either lies with a single individual or a single vote: the vote that bindsthem all. This authority expresses the movement’s identity. They are irrational movements, by which I mean that they cast aside expertise where that conflicts with the movements wishes. As a result, you will find their base of supporters among the less well educated, and that universities are seen as an enemy.  Both groups are intensely nationalistic: both want to make America or England great again.

It is easy to relate each group to familiar concepts: class, race or whatever. But I think this classification misses something important. It misses what sustains these groups in their beliefs, allows them to maintain their world view which is so often contradicted by reality. Both groups get their information about the world from a section of the media that has turned news into propaganda. In the US this is Fox, and in the UK the right wing tabloids and the Telegraph.

A profound mistake is to see this media as a symptom rather than a cause. As the study I spoke about here clearly demonstrates, the output of Fox news is not designed to maximise its readership, but to maximise the impact of its propaganda on its readership. I think you could say exactly the same about the Sun and the Mail in the UK. Fox and the Sun are owned by the same man.

Even those who manage to cast off the idea that this unregulated media just reflects the attitude of its readers, generally think of this media as supportive of political parties. There is the Conservative and Labour supporting press in the UK, and similarly for the US. In my view that idea is ten or twenty years out of date, and even then it underestimates the independence of the media organisations. (The Sun famously supported Blair in 1997). More and more it is the media that calls the shots, and the political parties follow.

Brexit would not have happened if it had remained the wish of a minority of Conservative MPs. It happened because of the right wing UK press. Brexit happened because this right wing press recognised a large section of their readership were disaffected from conventional politics, and began grooming them with stories of EU immigrants taking jobs, lowering wages and taking benefits (and sometimes much worse). These stories were not (always) false, but like all good propaganda they elevated a half-truth into a firm belief. Of course this grooming played on age old insecurities, but it magnified them into a political movement. Nationalism does the same. It did not just reflect readers existing views, but rather played on their doubts and fears and hopes and turned this into votes.

This is not to discount some of the very real grievances that led to the Brexit vote, or the racism that led to the election of Trump. This analysis of today's populism is important, as long as it does not get sidetracked into debates over identity versus economics. Stressing economic causes of populism does not devalue identity issues (like race or immigration), but it is the economics that causes the swings that help put populists in power. It was crucial, for example, to the trick that the media played to convince many to vote for Brexit: that EU immigrants and payments were reducing access to public services, whereas in reality the opposite is true.

Yet while economic issues may have created a winning majority for both Brexit and Trump, the identity issues sustained by the media make support for both hard to diminish. Brexit and Trump are expressions of identity, and often of what has been lost, which are very difficult to break down when sustained by the group’s media. In addition both Trump and Brexit maintain, because their proponents want it to be maintained, the idea that it represents the normally ignored, striking back against the government machine in the capital city with all its experts.

But to focus on what some call the ‘demand’ for populism is in danger of missing at least half the story. Whatever legitimate grievances Brexit and Trump supporters may have had, they were used and will be betrayed. There is nothing in leaving the EU that will help the forgotten towns of England and Wales. Although he may try, Trump will not bring many manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt, and his antics with NAFTA may make things worse. Identifying the left behind is only half the story, because it does not tell you why they fell for the remedies of snake-oil salesmen.

As I wrote immediately after the vote in my most widely read post, Brexit was first and foremost a triumph for the UK right wing press. That press first fostered a party, UKIP, that embodied the views the press pushed. The threat of that party and defections to it then forced the Prime Minister to offer the referendum the press wanted. It was a right wing press that sold a huge lie about the UK economy, a lie the broadcast media bought, to ensure the Conservatives won the next election. When the referendum came, it was this right wing press that ensured enough votes were won and thereby overturned the government.

Equally Donald Trump was first and foremost the candidate of Fox News. As Bruce Bartlett has so eloquently written, Fox may have started off as a network that just supported Republicans, but its power steadily grew. Being partisan at Fox became misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

Fox became a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up, believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It was Fox News that stopped Republican voters seeing that they were voting for a demagogue, concealed that he lied openly all the time, that incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. It is not reflecting the views of its viewers, but moulding them. As economists have shown, the output of Fox does not optimise their readership, but optimises the propaganda power of its output. Despite occasional tiffs, Trump was the candidate of Fox in the primaries.

We have a right wing media organisation that has overthrown the Republican political establishment, and a right wing press that has overthrown a right wing government. How some political scientists can continue to analyse this as if the media were simply passive, supportive or even invisible when it brings down governments or subverts political parties I do not know.

The plutocracy

Trump and Brexit are the creations of a kind of plutocracy. Politics in the US has had strong plutocratic elements for some time, because of the way that money can sway elections. That gave finance a powerful influence in the Democratic party, and made the Republicans obsessive about cutting higher tax rates. In the UK plutocracy has been almost non-existent by comparison, and operated mainly through party funding and seats in the House of Lords, although we are still finding out where the money behind the Brexit campaign came from.

By focusing on what some call the demand side of populism rather than the supply side, we fail to see both Trump and Brexit as primarily expressions of plutocratic power. Trump’s administration is plutocracy personified, and as Paul Pierson argues, its substantive agenda constitutes a full-throated endorsement of the GOP economic elite’s long-standing agenda. The Brexiteers want to turn the UK into Singapore, a kind of neoliberalism that stresses markets should be free from government interference, rather than free to work for everyone, and that trade should be free from regulations, rather than regulations being harmonised so that business is free to trade.

It is also a mistake to see this plutocracy as designed to support capital. This should again be obvious from Brexit and Trump. It is in capital’s interest to have borders open to goods and people rather than creating barriers and erecting walls. What a plutocracy will do is ensure that high inequality, in terms of the 1% or 0.1% etc, is maintained or even increased. Indeed many plutocrats amassed their wealth by extracting large sums from the firms for which they worked, wealth that might otherwise have gone to investors in the form of dividends. In this sense they are parasitic to capital. And this plutocracy will also ensure that social mobility is kept low so the membership of the plutocracy is sustained: social mobility goes with equality, as Pickett and Wilkinson show.

It is also a mistake to see what is happening as somehow the result of some kind of invisible committee of the 1% (or 0.1% and so on). The interests of the Koch brothers are not necessarily the interests of Trump (it is no accident the former want to help buy Time magazine). The interests of Arron Banks are not those of Lloyd Blankfein. Instead we are finding individual media moguls forming partnerships with particular politicians to press not only their business interests, but their individual political views as well. And in this partnership it is often clear who is dependent on whom. After all, media competition is slim while there are plenty of politicians.

What has this got to do with neoliberalism? which is supposed to be the dominant culture of the political right. As I argued here, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as some kind of unified ideology. It may have a common core in terms of the primacy of the market, but how that is interpreted is not uniform. Are neoliberals in favour of free trade, or against? It appears that they can be both. Instead neoliberalism is a set of ideas based around a common belief in the market that different groups have used and interpreted to their advantage, while at the same time also being influenced by the ideology. Both interests and ideas matter. While some neoliberals see competition as the most valuable feature of capitalism, others will seek to stifle competition to preserve monopoly power. Brexiters and their press backers are neoliberals, just as the Cameron government they brought down were neoliberals.

I think there is some truth in the argument, made by Philip Mirowski among others, that a belief in neoliberalism can easily involve an anti-enlightenment belief that people need to be persuaded to subject themselves fully to the market. Certainly those on the neoliberal right are more easily persuaded to invest time and effort in the dark arts of spin than those on the left. But it would be going too far to suggest that all neoliberals are anti-democratic: as I have said, neoliberalism is diverse and divided. What I argued in my neoliberal overreach post was that neoliberalism as formulated in the UK and US had made it possible for the plutocracy we now see to become dominant.

By the nature of an unorganised plutocracy, what types of neoliberalism hold sway may be largely random, and depend a lot on who owns media organisations. It leads to a form of politics which is in many ways unpredictable and irrational, with an ever present tendency to autocracy. This is what we are witnessing, right now, in the UK and US. It is not the normal politics that either of these countries are used to, although it may be more familiar to those in quasi-dictatorships. We all know about how the Republican’s tax cutting bill just happens to favour real estate moguls who inherit their money as Trump did. This is simple corruption, enacted in a corrupt way. That the President of the United States retweeted a British far right group that inspired an individual to murder a British MP is not normal. When Brexit supporting MPs respond to the Irish border problem by saying ‘we are not going to put one up’ this should not pass as an acceptable response: it should be laughed at as the nonsense it is.

When politics becomes the whims and mad schemes of a small minority that only listen to themselves, unmodified by the normal checks and balances of a functioning democracy, it should be treated by the non-partisan media for what it is, not normalised as just more of the same. If we treat a plutocracy as a democracy, democracy dies. We should not be fooled that this plutocracy looks like normal politics just because the plutocrats have taken over the main party of the right.

A dividing point

We are very close to a point where neoliberalism becomes something much worse. The POTUS is following a fascist strategy of demonising a religious minority. If Mueller’s investigations proceed as expected, but he is sacked and/or the Republicans block any attempt at impeachment, we may have passed that critical point. If the Brexiters succeed in breaking away from the EU’s customs union and single market, the UK may have nowhere else to go but the arms of a permanently Republican US.

If there is a way of escaping this fate, and rescuing democracy in both the UK and US, it has to involve a democratic defeat of the right wing parties that allowed this plutocracy to emerge, and indeed encouraged it and then made bargains with it when it believed it was still in control. The defeat has to be overwhelming and total. Those who brought us Brexit and backed or tolerated Trump have to be disgraced as the harbingers of disaster. Their control of the Republican and Conservative parties must end.

Only that will allow the left, and I think it has to be the left, to end a system by which elements of the plutocracy can control so much of the means of information. In the UK that means extending rules that apply to broadcasters, suitably adapted, to the press. In the US it means not just bringing back the Fairness doctrine repealed under Reagan, but also bringing controls on election spending similar to those in the UK (and the UK controls need to be strengthened). In short, we need to take money out of politics to ensure democracy survives. Give journalists the freedom to write about or broadcast the news as they see it, rather than as their employer want it to be seen.

Why the left rather than the centre? The centre will agonise over what this means for freedom of expression or freedom of the press and therefore nothing much will happen (see Leveson), as nothing happened under Clinton or Blair. That may be a little unfair to both leaders, because the danger of plutocracy may have been less obvious back then, and the media was more restrained. But with Brexit and Trump no further evidence is needed. The left should see more clearly how in practice this freedom is in reality just a freedom to sustain a plutocracy. Only it will have the courage to radically reverse the power and wealth of the 1%. I fear the centre will not have the will to do it. Although Anthony Barnett’s focus differs from mine, he puts this point very well here: if all you want to do is stop Brexit and Trump and go back to what you regard as normal, you miss that what was normal led to Brexit and Trump.

That will have many wise and sensible people shaking their head, but the alternative does not work. Defeating or impeaching Trump and letting the Republican party survive in its current form achieves little, because they will go on gerrymandering and Fox news will go on poisoning minds. The energy of Democrats will be spent on trying to clear up the damage Trump has caused, and the next autocrat from Republican ranks who wins power because they will ‘clear the swamp’ will be smarter than Trump. In the UK, if the Conservatives survive in their current form, their ageing membership is in danger of selecting more Brexit nutters who will overwhelm the dwindling number of reasonable Conservative MPs. We will find the BBC, if it survives at all, will become more and more like the mouthpiece of a press dominated by plutocrats. [1] In either case a critical point will have passed.

I know from many conversations I have had that there is a deep fear among many of leadership from the left. Here the UK is ahead of the US. The story in the UK used to be that the left could never win, and it was a plausible story, but recent events have cast great doubt on it. That remains the story in the US, but there are good reasons for doubting it there too. There is no reason why all of the disenchanted who fell for the lies of the snake-oil salesmen could not support radical remedies from the left: identity and the media are strong but it is economics that dictates the swings.

In the UK now the story seems much more elemental: that somehow the left threatens the existence of capitalism and democracy. In truth there is no way Corbyn could persuade the Labour party to abandon democratic capitalism, just as there is no way Sanders or Warren could do the same in the US. All we are talking about is rolling back many of the results of neoliberalism. But it is difficult to logically convince someone the ghosts they see do not exist. In contrast to these ghosts on the left, the dynamic of plutocracy that I have described here is very real, and it requires radical change to bring an end to this dynamic.

[1] This is why arguments that say the UK press is becoming less powerful because of its falling readership fail. If this press dominate the news agenda of the broadcasters, they do not need many readers.