Futures Forum: School Strike for Climate Action UK > Friday 15th March > striking for the ocean
It appears, then, that climate change activism is going mainstream, even 'populist':
Futures Forum: Climate change: "there is a sense of a new consciousness abroad concerning the future of our planet"
Futures Forum: Climate change: Why has climate activism has failed so far to change people's attitudes?
So, who exactly are the 'populists' now?
Futures Forum: Populism @ Radio 4
Futures Forum: Can populism be progressive?
Futures Forum: How meritocracy and populism reinforce each other's faults
This is from an excellent piece in this weekend's Financial Times:
Secrets of the populist playbook
How a new breed of political strategist paved the way for Trump and Orbán
Simon Kuper MARCH 14, 2019
Arthur Finkelstein, a rightwing American political campaign manager who died in 2017, almost never spoke in public. The gay son of a Brooklyn taxi driver was so secretive that he booked hotels under assumed names.
Practically the only audible trace he left is a speech in 2011 at the obscure Cevro Institut in Prague. It’s worth listening to on YouTube, because in it Finkelstein foretells the political future.
The economic crisis, he says in broad Brooklynese, “appears, at least from my travels around, to be much worse than it feels to most of us. There is real anger.” Everywhere, its targets were ethnic minorities. In the US, he noted, “the anger is at the Mexicans. Not even all Hispanics — the Mexicans.”
In such times, “from-nowhere politicians” could suddenly emerge. Given the economic mess, predicted Finkelstein, “we’re looking at business people to become leaders”. Who in particular? “I don’t know if anybody here is watching Donald Trump in the US, but it’s mind-boggling. It’s just pure personality.” Trump was then in full pursuit of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Finkelstein helped create populism. He advised Nixon, Reagan, Netanyahu and Orbán. Several of Trump’s campaign advisers in 2016, notably Roger Stone, had been Finkelstein’s mentees.
Davide Casaleggio, a brain behind Italy’s innovative Five-Star Movement, once said that old political parties were like Blockbuster; new ones were like Netflix. Most traditional parties, at least until 2016, used 20th-century techniques. They spoke in wooden, evasive language. They competed for the political centre. They chose leaders who had spent decades ascending the party machine. And they ditched vision: Da Empoli says progressives went in one generation from “turn your dreams into reality” to “turn reality into your dream”.
By contrast, populism’s influences are 21st-century. Trump came from reality TV. His “historical merit”, says Da Empoli, lay in understanding that election campaigns were “very mediocre” reality shows, “produced by dilettantes and populated by sad personalities without lives . . . B-list performers, the wrong Clinton, the wrong Bush”.
Another populist influence was video game culture. Steve Bannon (more effective backstage than front) briefly invested in gaming in 2005. He lost money but discovered a vast underworld of young men who practised anonymous online aggression.
When social media came along, populist start-ups quickly learnt its techniques. Like reality TV and video games, social media rewards engagement. If a meme goes viral — “Build the wall!” — populists refine and run with it. If it doesn’t, they drop it. Populist leaders and their social-media followers feed each other in an eternal cycle.
So populist parties meet political demand, while amassing data on voters. That allows them to target micro-groups with messages that no one else sees. Electoral campaigns become “wars between software”, writes Da Empoli. Supporters come to feel like participants rather than spectators.
Populists separate campaigning from governance. Their leaders are selected not for any governing skills but strictly for their ability to drive engagement. That’s why many of them — Beppe Grillo, Boris Johnson, Trump — come from entertainment industries. A quick route to engagement is arousing anger. In Finkelstein’s words, “The guy who says, ‘I have a seven-point plan for fixing the pensions system’” will lose to “the guy who says, ‘Throw them out! Get rid of those people’”.
For Finkelstein, more important than choosing one’s own candidate was selecting the right enemy. The ideal enemy is a person or group who can be presented as the embodiment of assorted evils. The populist script says: no matter how placid and safe your country might seem, this enemy intends to destroy your way of life or even kill you.
In 2004, Finkelstein joked: “In terms of the Republicans, Hillary Clinton is a wonderful candidate for the presidency.” Working for Orbán in 2013, he chose George Soros as the enemy. (There were obvious echoes of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Party’s enemy in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Finkelstein, though Jewish himself, used anti-Semitic tropes against Soros. He wasn’t a racist; he just liked winning games.
Populists attract some extremists. The populist candidate never disavows them because they are his strongest supporters and they make him look moderate by comparison. So Trump needed the Charlottesville neo-Nazis just as Netanyahu needs the Jewish Power party.
Now traditional parties are learning populist techniques. US Democrats have found their ideal enemy in Trump, and will presumably avoid choosing an ideal enemy as their own candidate for 2020. Everywhere since the Women’s March of January 2017, mainstream voters have morphed from spectators into participants. And some new politicians, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, can rival Trump for engagement. To some degree, we are all populists now.
Follow Simon on @KuperSimon or email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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Secrets of the populist playbook | Financial Times
This blog has looked at many of these issues, for example:
Futures Forum: Facebook and the Age of Manipulation
Futures Forum: Brexit: and "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"
Futures Forum: Brexit: and Exeter's MP asking for 'a full police inquiry'
Futures Forum: Brexit: Legatum and Exeter's MP calling for 'urgent investigations' into Legatum
Futures Forum: Against charity: for NGOs
Futures Forum: Brexit: and Exeter's MP pushing for further investigations
Futures Forum: Brexit: and bots
Futures Forum: Civil society under threat
Futures Forum: Civil society under attack?
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