Krystal Ball on N.Robinsons critique of her…

WV,

Is this Round Two, or have I missed any?

;>)

After watching/reading this one, I give it again to Robinson. On points, if not a TKO.

To me, Ball went cheap-shot with the “comparing everyone on the right to Hitler,” which Robinson didn’t do . . . and the “ideological purity” dig, which is what I hear from Dems when I argue for leftist solutions/ideas. Either that or “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” or some such obnoxious variation. She should know better, cuz she’s probably been on the other side of that canard.

I completely agree with Robinson that there is no such thing as “right-populism.” Have always seen that as a classic oxymoron. It just goes against everything they say they stand for. They don’t want proactive, collective action for the greater good, at least not via the public sector, and since they love capitalism, which means they want “competition,” they don’t want it in the private sector, either. Every man for themselves, etc.

For centuries, they’ve supported elites and neck-breaking hierarchies as righteous, God-given or based entirely on “merit.” It’s the “natural order of things” for them. If someone is for taking direct action for the greater good, they’re not a righty. Righties honestly believe this is done via the capitalist system itself — again, “naturally.”

I’m also puzzled by the insistence that we leftists supposedly need to form coalitions with anyone on the right. Why? They’re what we oppose, and always have opposed.

Plus, we’re small. The populist right is small, too, but powerful. It has the backing of billionaires, and the often secret backing of all kinds of corporations. So if we were ever stupid enough to help them gain power, they’d betray us in a nanosecond, with backing, and we’d be worse off than ever before. We’d be helping a Wilders, a Bolsonaro, a Trump gain control, and they’d laugh at us and call us “antifa” and we’d never see the light of day again.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Billy_T.

From Robinson’s piece:

It’s a bad idea to listen to right-wingers who claim to be on the side of “the people.” Usually it turns out they want to crush the people by force. Nathan J. Robinson

All of which is to say: Right-wing populism seems like a terrible ideology that needs to be rejected. I disagree with nearly everything these people believe in. The kind of world they believe in is not one I wish to inhabit. They are in favor of reactionary cultural traditions, militarized borders, bigotry, and rabid nationalism. I am a leftist, meaning that I favor free movement of people and multiculturalism. I am anti-nationalist and anti-militarist. Donald Trump’s ideology seems to me to be monstrous.

I find it peculiar, then, to hear “right populism” and “left populism” discussed as part of the same tendency. Usually when this is done, it is by centrists, who subscribe to the “horseshoe theory” that fascism and socialism have a lot in common. (The idea is that the political spectrum, instead of a line, is horseshoe-shaped, meaning that the ends come together.) This is what led the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute (a “progressive” and “free market” think tank, respectively) to collaborate on a project about combating “authoritarian populism” from both the “right and left.” Their idea is that Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, Bernie Sanders, Jair Bolsonaro, etc. can all be understood as part of the same tendency, because they all seek to overthrow “elites” and “the establishment” in the name of “the people” and use the power of the state to create justice.

But this idea is fundamentally wrong, because it fails to acknowledge the massive difference between the Left and the Right, namely that the Right’s brand of populism is a complete and utter swindle that involves scapegoating foreigners for social problems, while left “populism” is generally anti-racist and egalitarian. Right-wing populists do not actually care about “the people”; Trump and Bolsonaro may have pitched themselves as crusaders against “elites,” but neither actually cares about helping anyone but their wealthy cronies. Both want to privatize public assets, which in practice means simply giving away the people’s collective wealth to oligarchs. Both of them have been utterly indifferent to the socially unequal consequences of coronavirus, and both are accelerating their country’s contributions to the climate crisis, which will cause “the people” incredible suffering. Neither has any interest in deepening democracy; their ideal societies are characterized by massive wealth inequality. They are about as “populist” as the Nazis were “socialist,” meaning that it is a convenient label that makes them sound like something they aren’t.