The meme that is destroying Western civilisation--Part 1
Making sense of the mess of Left-->Right and Right-->Left electoral results
In France, an ostensibly progressive leader (Macron) is in the process of losing power to the Far Right (Le Pen). In the UK, the Conservative Party is about to lose in a landslide to the ostensibly progressive party, Labour. In the USA, the ostensibly progressive Democrats seem likely to lose, once more, to the Republicans under Donald Trump. In Australia, an ostensibly progressive party (Labor) turfed out the conservative party (Liberal-National Party), and its then highly unpopular leader Scott Morrison. He was replaced by an even more conservative leader, which you might think would have increased Labor’s hold. But instead, the trend in voting is clearly favouring the conservatives rather than the progressives. With the next Australian election a year away, the odds are that an ostensibly progressive party will lose to its conservative rival.
Counting these results using the Left-Right calculus, we have:
France: Left 0, Right 1
UK: Left 1, Right 0
USA: Left 0, Right 1
Australia: Left 0, Right 1
That gives a 3:1 result in favour of the Right, so you could argue that there’s a right-wing trend across most of the West. But there are 2 far more informative ways to interpret these results.
Firstly, incumbents are zero, while challengers are 4: whoever is in power, Right or Left, is losing to those not in power.
More informatively, the losers are parties that have most recently imposed Neoliberal policies on the electorate: austerity from the UK’s Tories, obedience to the Maastricht Treaty’s limits on government spending in France, the Australian Labor Party crowing about running a government surplus and putting business (lots of new coal and gas mines) ahead of its social agenda. The USA is a bit fuzzy on this front: Biden has run substantial deficits after Covid, but he is a also continuation of the anti-deficit spending Washington consensus; and Obama gave way to Trump after he (Obama) defeated austerity-oriented Bush, and then imposed austerity-oriented policies in the aftermath to the Global Financial Crisis.
This is the pattern I see: the Party in power runs Neoliberal policies; it loses the next election to rivals who, when they get in power, also run Neoliberal policies. They then lose, and the cycle repeats.
This pattern is about to repeat in the UK: on July 4th, the Labour Party will destroy the austerity-fixated Conservatives, and then it will continue those same austerity-fixated policies when in power.
The real question then is, why do both sides of politics deliver Neoliberal, austerity-oriented policies when in power? Since they end up being disastrous for them politically, why don’t they offer and try something different?
I’ll answer that question in tomorrow’s post.
Compulsory superannuation was an important initiative of the ALP and it has been with us ever since. By making superannuation compulsory, growing flows of contributions have been channeled into the financial sector fuelling collateral for the leveraging of debt growth relative to GDP growth, amplifying financial disorder, misallocating scarce resources and concentrating wealth. Compulsory superannuation is an example of what is known as the fallacy of composition ...what is beneficial on an individual level can lead to negative consequences when made compulsory at a national level.
Its obvious that they (the general populace, the politicians and the oligarchy) are unaware of a true third alternative and/or in the case of the oligarchy...they don't care. And that includes the "economists" who are overwhelmingly neo-classically orthodox and so re-inforce the continual fail.
Its not just the ego involved neo-classicals. You have to develope a mass movement showing the un-astute general populace paradigm changing policies that don't make their eyes glaze over and that benefits the bourgeosie even more than the present mess. We, the oppressed are many, those opposing full paradigmatic change are few.