Comment by bjoli
9 days ago
Why do people vote for populists that inevitably will just do the bidding of the rich and powerful? That man is such a disgustingly clear example.
The same thing is true in Sweden. People vote for the party that blames the immigrants and then goes on to rule with the liberal conservative part. They all know that during the time they claim is the downfall of Sweden, we have more than one third of state tax income and had the worst privatisation of schools worldwide, . Yet the problems with schools and healthcare is immigration.
Demagogues are what they are.
It's not "blaming the immigrants"--that is such a gross oversimplification and distraction. No, the immigrants were pawns, and the predictable outcomes caused by having too many immigrants, as well as those who profited off of that situation--they are ones that the anger is directed towards. A lot of countries, the US included, were on a sustainable path, and then BOOM, the influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts threw a wrench into everything. Our schools are ruined. Our neighborhoods are ruined. Prices of necessities are through the roof. Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence. Yet somehow it is "wrong" to assign blame! The immigrants are merely a symptom of a vast betrayal.
That may be the perception, but it's still not how it happened.
All of the currently-rich nations had a multi-generational baby boom*, long enough for their systems to assume and become dependent on that population growth.
* babies being the most extreme example of "influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts", though people only objected to them in the UK when I was a kid when it was single mothers producing them
Families started to have fewer kids, but the systems still presumed and needed more people to avoid stagnation. Japan chose stagnation instead of welcoming as many immigrants as it needed, and "the lost decade" became a plural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
> Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence.
I assume from this that you're American? That's basically just America that has this problem. Healthcare and health insurance is fine in most other developed (and developing) nations, even e.g. here in Germany in those few years where it took on around a million asylum seekers.
• https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
• https://ourworldindata.org/financing-healthcare
Influx of illiterate people, sure. But then it is an even worse thing to cut taxes and cutting the budget for SFI (Swedish for immigrants).
The school results are worse. Even here the claim is that it is the immigrants' fault. The privatisation of the school system in sweden has led to increased segregation of the school system. Private schools can be found in areas where they get "easy students". Yet they fail to deliver any better results than public schools. Which is amazingly dumb. The state pays private schools (they are open for anyone and have no tuition fees). The schools can then let less money go to tuition and more to the share holders/owners, while being able to claim that they are just as good as schools with all the tough students. By all measurements they should be much better. It is such an enormous failure.
And who do we blame? Immigrants.
And social mobility is going downwards. Not nearly as low in the US, but I want to think that we at least still believe in the value of hard work.
People don’t vote for populists by accident, votes for populists are a symptom of elite failure to build a society that works for everyone while writing their columns, appearing on their panels, or staffing their NGOs. There's a whole class of politicians in Britain who treats politics as a posture, not a practice - and believes people are too stupid to see through it.
> There's a whole class of politicians in Britain who treats politics as a posture, not a practice - and believes people are too stupid to see through it.
IMO, many of the UK politicians themselves don't realise how out of touch they are, both with the people and with the systematic reality of the world in which they exist. (Thinking back to David Davis on Brexit, saying they had a good idea what Czechoslovakia wanted from negotiations, despite it having ceased to exist in 1992).
I don’t see any change coming until politicians stop seeing public opinion as something to be managed and placated. The lesson taken from Truss seems to have been broadly to never try anything bold again to fix the economy.
Because they provide simple appealing answers that rarely ask for much effort on behalf of the consumer.