Populism

• PORTLAND, Maine, March 1, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America, produced by Diversified Communications, announces keynote speaker Mark Blyth – William R. Rhodes '57 Professor of International Economics, The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University – and over 30 conference sessions presented by top professionals from across the sector on important topics facing the seafood industry.
• The keynote session will be held on Sunday, March 10th at 11:00am in room 153CB.
• The conference program, taking place during the three-day expo, will highlight timely topics and bring together a range of professionals to share their unique perspectives and insights.
• Another session will include professionals from the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, H-E-B and Riverence talking through what drives U.S. consumer behavior and demand for seafood.

• Authoritarian leaders might be good at damaging democracy, but unless they are pure dictators they often still need to worry about winning elections.
• In the last few years, Europe has seen the rise of a number of authoritarian populists who rely on winning mass support among ordinary people – as opposed to just rigging the vote.
• It’s similar in many countries presided over by authoritarian populists.

Why media ownership matters

• Yet a closer look reveals an interesting structural feature of media ownership networks in authoritarian populist countries.
• For instance, in Hungary, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) is a huge right-wing media conglomerate that controls more than 500 national and local media outlets.
• Kesma was established in 2018, when most pro-government private media owners transferred their ownership rights to the foundation, which is headed by a board of trustees full of Orbán loyalists closely associated to the ruling party.

Love your enemies

• You might expect authoritarian populist governments to be more like the old totalitarian regimes which pulled out all the stops to silence any dissenting voices.
• This was the strategy of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
• It’s also convenient for an authoritarian regime to set up an “us versus them” situation, where “they” can be vilified and ridiculed by regime-friendly media.
• In Hungary, for instance – in a wider strategy to discredit independent media news – pro-government media outlets have launched smear campaigns against independent media outlets funded by international grants.
• This allows them to set up internal enemies as a target for their supporters.

• In Moral Progress in Dark Times, German philosopher Markus Gabriel makes a case for a new enlightenment based on universal values, arguing that the democratic law-based state is a valuable vehicle for encouraging this “moral progress”.
• Review: Moral Progress in Dark Times: Universal Values for the 21st Century – Marcus Gabriel (Wiley)

Moral realism

• He asserts the objectivity of moral facts, their universality, and their essential knowability by human beings – although he concedes that in “dark times” they can be obscured by ideology, propaganda, psychology and manipulation.
• According to Gabriel, moral facts are not justified by God, human reason or evolution, but “by themselves”.
• Moral realism is conventionally opposed to ethical relativism, which proposes that morality depends on the standards, norms and practices of particular times and places.
• He links evolutionary psychology to our capacity to discern moral truths, without supposing an evolutionary explanation for those truths.

Day of Judgement

• The new moral enlightenment he proposes is overly optimistic and, in any attempt to implement, potentially problematic.
• He asks us to consider what our reaction would be if we were facing God’s judgement and God commended us for all the bad things we have done and condemned us for the good.
• We would find this judgement incomprehensible.

Populism and identity politics

• Of particular interest is his rejection of identity politics.
• Identity politics, argues Gabriel, establishes patterns between “identities” and the distribution of material and symbolic resources.
• Identity politics stands on the “propagation of stereotypes”.
• The near-religious fervour of identity politics, Gabriel suggests, arises from stereotypical social identities becoming metaphysically “charged”.
• Identity politics must be overcome in the light of universal moral values.

Difference politics

• Against identity politics, Gabriel advocates “difference politics”.
• Difference politics is not simply a matter of tolerating diverse identities; it requires us to understand difference as a feature of our common humanity.
• But recognising difference is only a necessary first step towards tolerance and leniency.
• Gabriel argues that if race has no biological basis, which it doesn’t, then it cannot be grounds for assigning special rights.

Spirit

• Biology and evolutionary psychology show humans are adaptable animals sharing a “survival form”.
• A baby of one ethnicity raised in a culture of another ethnicity will automatically learn the language and culture of their social context.
• But humans are not only animals, according to Gabriel.
• Read more:
  What Socrates' 'know nothing' wisdom can teach a polarized America

Darkening of spirit

• Moral progress is threatened by “digital distortions”, which undermine our knowledge of truth, facts, knowledge and ethics.
• Internet dependence can lead us to treat self-evident moral truths, such as respect for others, as null and void.
• The vast majority of people accepted lockdowns for moral reasons: they believed lockdowns would protect the vulnerable and support hospital systems.
• He criticises neoliberalism for assuming that progress can be achieved by leaving as many decisions as possible to the market.

• He argued in a celebrated essay that even the prosperous, post-Second World War United States was not immune to the radicalism of authoritarian populism.
• The so-called Red Scare of the 1950s was “simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary pressures of the contemporary world.” Seven decades later, Hofstadter’s words ring true again.

Paranoid politics

• With so much money and power behind it, this paranoid style of politics — with its enemies lists, demonization of opposition leaders and often violent language — has gone mainstream.
• But is there anything to fear from the red-hot rhetoric of the paranoid style of politics?
• In Hofstadter’s time, after all, American conservative politics turned away from fringe radicalism following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
• The following year, Lyndon Johnson defeated right-wing Republican insurgent, Barry Goldwater in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.

1. The shrinking middle ground

• We are now in a world of zero-sum political contests, with a shrinking middle ground.
• Conservative parties often force extreme referendums to maintain their grip on a deeply divided electorate.
• Republicans are now doubling down on the abortion issue, even though they’re facing pushback from some state legislatures and governors.

2. The working class isn’t benefiting

• Nevertheless, conservative parties around the world are marketing themselves as parties of the working class.
• Populists recognize the working class is essential to their success at the national level because of the “diploma divide” that now separates right and left.
• It used to be that working people recognized education as a path to prosperity.

3. The rich and powerful direct the chaos

• In a war of all against all, it’s not the wealthy who lose.
• Furthermore, once a lust for vengeance takes hold in the general public, it’s almost always being directed by elites with money and power who benefit financially or politically from the chaos.

4. Assaults on the rule of law

• The paranoid style of politics has entered a new phase with a full-spectrum assault on the rule of law — from inside government.
• Populists are lying when they argue they want to empower the rest of us by divesting judges of their authority to oversee democracy.
• As he runs again for president, he’s already telegraphing his violent desires, promising pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

The road ahead for populists

• The defeats of Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro don’t represent absolute rejections of their movements.
• Despite an indictment for alleged financial crime and being found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case, Trump is still the 2024 front-runner.
• Read more:
  Why populism has an enduring and ominous appeal

  We can’t count on an easy institutional fix, like a grand electoral coalition to push the populists off the ballot.

Red lights flashing

• Nor can we count on the right to step back from the abyss of culture wars.
• We can’t even say for certain that the populism will recede in the usual cyclical manner.
• All citizens can do is offer is constant, concerted pushback against the many big lies told by populists.