January 8th, 2017

01-08-2017

The Patriots v.s. The Cosmopolitans

[caption id="attachment_18631" align="alignleft" width="225"] By JÄNNICK Jérémy, CC BY 3.0[/caption] Greg Ip argues that the ideological battle of our time is between globalists and patriots.

"Late on a Sunday evening a little more than a year ago, Marine Le Pen took the stage in a depressed working-class town in northern France. She had just lost an election for the region’s top office, but the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-euro National Front did not deliver a concession speech. Instead, Ms. Le Pen proclaimed a new ideological struggle. “Now, the dividing line is not between left and right but globalists and patriots,” she declared, with a gigantic French flag draped behind her. Globalists, she charged, want France to be subsumed in a vast, world-encircling “magma.” She and other patriots, by contrast, were determined to retain the nation-state as the “protective space” for French citizens. Ms. Le Pen’s remarks foreshadowed the tectonic forces that would shake the world in 2016. The British vote to leave the European Union in June and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November were not about whether government should be smaller but whether the nation-state still mattered. Ms. Le Pen now has a shot at winning France’s presidential elections this spring, which could imperil the already reeling EU and its common currency.Supporters of these disparate movements are protesting not just globalization—the process whereby goods, capital and people move ever more freely across borders—but globalism, the mind-set that globalization is natural and good, that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts. The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron ? But globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last. That, at least, is how the new nationalists see it."

The last time we witnessed a worldwide populist revolt against democracy was in the 1920s and 1930s. Then the populist movements in Europe were internationalist and imperialist. The populists of today are nationalist. In one sense that is comforting. As Hannah Arendt argued in the magisterial second part of Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarianism is connected with internationalist and imperialist movements that seek infinite and totalizing expansion. It is in the nature of totalitarianism that it makes absolute and totalizing claims that are not limited to particular nations. What needs to be understood is why, after nearly a half-century of world-wide consensus in favor of globalization, have the people around the world rejected the ideology of globalism. Ip argues that the backlash against globalism is less economic than cultural. There is, also, a third possibility, that the backlash against globalism is neither economic nor cultural, but is driven by the failure of political, cultural, and economic institutions at all levels. Whatever the cause, cultural movements—while they need not be racist and xenophobic—easily can be. As Ip writes, " In short, there is ample reason for skepticism about whether the new nationalists can prove themselves a genuinely secular, democratic alternative to globalism." Arendt's book The Origins of Totalitarianism has never been more relevant. The Hannah Arendt Center Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz will lead a 10 session online reading group on The Origins of Totalitarianism beginning on Friday, Jan. 20th. Learn more and register here. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: http://www.wsj.com/articles/we-arent-the-world-1483728161

The Revolt of the Public

Martin Gurri argues that we are witnessing a "Revolt of the Public" (also the title of his recent book) that is fractured and "unified only by the force of its negations" and a "mood of rejection."

"Many reasons have been proposed for the events of 2016, most of them related to the public’s unhappiness with the global economy and the open borders it requires.  I think this confuses a token instance with the underlying cause. “The public” subsumes the hyper-educated multicultural Millennials who made a thing of Bernie Sanders, as well as the protectionist working class whites who put Trump over the top in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan.  Fractured and many-minded, the public, in truth, is unified only by the force of its negations:  but these transcend specific political or economic grievances to reach a nearly absolute judgment against the status quo. The mood of rejection is driven by information, distance, and failure.  Governing elites have lost control of the information sphere, and stand naked before the public.  In fear and loathing, under the pretext of managing utopian programs, they have withdrawn ever higher into hierarchies they have made ever steeper.  In a very real sense, the public isn’t alienated from government:  it’s the other way around.  Once this move is made, politicians are hostage to real-world outcomes – and having promised “solutions” to intractable social and economic conditions, they can only deliver failure. Elite failure sets the agenda for an informed public.  Officeholders, bureaucrats, elections, the whole creaking machinery of democratic governance, bleed out authority.  At length a tipping-point arrives, and the storm breaks. We can watch this dynamic at work on the potent issue of illegal immigration.  At street level, where the elites rarely show, immigration is experienced as a failure of border control.  Possibly a million undocumented persons enter the US each year.  Refugees are pouring into Europe in ever larger numbers.  Much of the public feels that the migrant tide threatens their jobs, safety, and culture.  They expect the government to intervene and stop the influx. But on this question government has ascended an astronomical distance away from the governed.  Ruling elites absolve themselves of any responsibility for border control, and treat illegal immigration as a test of moral purity.  Angela Merkel invited a million predominantly Muslim refugees into Germany and, by extension, the EU.  Embracing immigration was a “humanitarian duty,” she asserted.  Opposition was judged by its most immoderate voices, those of “rightwing extremists and neo-Nazis.”  It was from similar moral heights that Hillary Clinton famously dismissed “half” of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables…racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.”"

Gurri argues that the tremendous growth in accessibility to information has nullifed the authority of elites in government and the media. In place of authoritative narratives, we now have vital communities, each with their own facts and their realities. The very premise of a nation-state, one with a common identity, may simply be incompatible with the emerging information age. If that is true, the resurgence in nationalism may be understood as a final and futile attempt to hold on to national identities that have defined the liberal world order for nearly 400 years. We are excited to announce that Martin Gurri will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center's 10th Annual Conference, "Thinking in Dark Times: The Crisis of Democracy," taking place Oct. 12-13, 2017. Save the Date. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/2016-a-hard-rain/

@HighCastlePhil

[caption id="attachment_18629" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use[/caption] To understand the way fake news works, Simon Van Zuylen Wood decided to dive into the world of Michael Flynn Jr., the 33-year-old son of President-elect Trump’s choice to be national security adviser. Flynn Jr. is an avid tweeter of fake news stories and has been especially enamored of the pizza-gate conspiracy. Van Zuylen Wood formed a fake Twitter account @HighCastlePhil and followed Flynn Jr.'s tailored feed of over 900 accounts for a week. Here is a bit of what he learned.

"The John Podesta-is-running-a-child-sex-trafficking-organization-out-of-a pizzeria conspiracy theory ricocheted from 4chan to reddit to fake news sites then back to social media throughout October and November. But only after real bullets were fired at the pizzeria on December 4 did mainstream news outlets begin thoroughly debunking the story. Michael Flynn Jr. wasn’t having it. “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many 'coincidences' tied to it,” he tweeted. Within a few days, Flynn Jr. was formally relieved of his duties on the Trump transition, and most of us in the pro journalism orbit moved on. But in the world of bizarro news, tens of thousands of pizzagate truthers were just warming up, convinced that our lack of interest was proof of a cover-up. Over the course of a couple days after I set up my feed, alt-right standard-bearer Mike Cernovich (183,000 followers, of which Flynn Jr. and @HighCastlePhil were two) went on a tweetstorm positing that liberal organ Salon was wrapped up in a “money-laundering mechanism for pedophiles.” Cernovich posted screenshots of several recent (non-fake) confessional-style articles published on the site with titles like “I’m a Pedophile But Not a Monster.” Cernovich was trawling for evidence that liberal media pizzagate deniers were sympathetic toward child abusers. He was in turn widely derided by journalists, which, he said, only proved his point. “Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, and Upworthy already attacking (weak) me for this investigation. This means we are on point. Investigate Salon.” Eager to learn more, I read a piece by a blogger named Aaron Kesel that Cernovich had been retweeting. Published on www.wearechange.org, it was titled “‘Virtuous Pedophiles’– Mike Cernovich Reveals Salon’s Dirty Secret.” Now Keseltoo started connecting dots between the Salon articles and Pizzagate, begging his readers to “FOCUS ON THE REAL EVIDENCE,” like “declassified FBI pedophile symbols.” “Then tell me how places like Comet Ping Pong Pizza were not possible pedophile meeting places or places to network given their symbols for pedophiles?” By then I was in deep. Kesel also linked to some YouTube footage about old pedophilia scandals, which is how I eventually stumbled upon a former TheStreet.com writer named David Seaman who has refashioned himself into a Pizzagate authority. A December 6 video homed in on CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who had urged Flynn Jr. to knock it off via direct Twitter message. Seaman said his hackles were raised by Tapper’s interest in quashing the story, combined with the presence of his name in certain of the leaked John Podesta emails, plus—gasp!—an interview Tapper’s wife had given in which she identified Comet Ping-Pong as one of her favorite restaurants to take the children. “Do you have something you want to tell us here, Jake?” Seaman asked, on camera. No, he didn't, because it was all baloney—Tapper was just trying to stand up for the truth. But at last count, the video had racked up more than 239,000 views. No way to know if Flynn Jr. watched the video, but for @highcastlephil, the path to Seaman’s videos was marked like an airplane runway at night."

Form more information visit: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/this-is-what-its-like-to-read-fake-news-for-two-weeks-214591