“A new form of ‘politics’ is present on the football pitch, in the most popular Netflix shows, in the ways people describe...
“A new form of ‘politics’ is present on the football pitch, in the most popular Netflix shows, in the ways people describe themselves on their social media pages. To many on the right, society now feels overtaken by a permanent Dreyfus Affair, cleaving family dinners, friends’ drinks, and workplace lunches. To many on the centre, it has created a longing for an era before this hyper-politics, ‘a nostalgia for post-history’ in the 1990s and 2000s, when markets and technocrats were exclusively in charge of policy.”— https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/01/from-post-politics-to-hyper-politics
I mean…yeah.
This is the world’s least surprising phenomenon, I think.
One of my least favourite 90′s myths is the idea that the “technocrats were in charge”; man if only. I remember what political campaigns and congress and parliaments were like then, and I really don’t think the word “technocrat” describes them at all, really! Just cause one tiny sliver of economists at the IMF/World Bank were flexing muscles doesn’t mean the modelers ran the globe.
I mean there was the Clinton admin folks who signed NAFTA and balanced the budget, the eurocrats who gave them the common currency and those that let China into the WTO.
I think thats the rub though - tons of economists for example thought the Euro was a bad idea due to the lack of fiscal unity and diverse productivities of the EU. NAFTA at least was elite consensus, but its just one of many free trade agreements - GATT is like 1947, bilateral free trade agreements pepper the cold war, and NAFTA itself was being negotiated in the 80′s. This is just an area where the “technocrats” had been powerful for 40+ years that continued on.
(And honestly free trade agreements are some of the most successful aspects of policy in the modern era, as we have lived through titanic improvements in the standard of living for the global poor since the 1980′s which these agreements are a part of. And a big part of their weaknesses have emerged from their ignoring of expert advice to pursue Pareto Optimality and ‘compensate the losers’. Certainly not saying these were perfect but I am very against the Counterpunch/Sanders-left interpretation of these being the ur-sin of America’s state decline over a lot of other decisions made and forces at work)
China into the WTO is also a classic not-technocrat thing; its an international law org! One of the LEAST technocratic thing imaginable, of toothless diplomats who talk and do nothing and just reflect back power dynamics of their home turfs instead of making any decisions.
I know a lot of people use “bureaucrat” and “technocrat” interchangeably but I think that strips them of meaning, and in particular in this context masks cause and effect. Powerless WTO bureaucrats reflect not their own ‘ideology’ but the refusal of the actual power-holders - the elected officials in governments - to enforce the rules they themselves agree to. The bureaucrats are simply the messengers being shot for the incompetency of those who make decisions, because bureaucrats are NOT technocrats, technocrats being defined by their ability to make their own decisions unaccountable (in some form) to the democratic check.
(EDIT: phrased another way letting China into the WTO would be a *great* thing if the WTO was an org where technocrats could *actually sanction China for violating the WTO* but they can’t really do that, because they aren’t technocrats)
And those globalization moves were made against populist sentiment, including the Battle for Seattle and the Ross Perot/Pat Buchanan campaigns
That is the gap between Populist and popular though - I don’t have exact polling on every issue of course, but the WTO Seattle riots were a tiny minority of folk, and Ross Perot lost pretty badly. We do have polling on NAFTA at least though, which showed it gaining popular support for its actual passage, then waffling between pluralities for or against over the next decades. It wasn’t some grand popular cause, but it wasn’t anti-popular either, just one of many issues Americans were “eh” on. I know the argument here, elite forces shaped the debate and dragged the public into agreeing with it etc etc. I guess given how often elite forces utterly fall flat on their face to shape public opinion on anything, I just don’t exactly buy it! I think these are fringe topics not core the root of America’s state decline (which I do believe occurred).
Ross Perot was for a time the front-runner (I think before he dropped out and re-started), and I believe that Perot just allowed himself to fall victim to the things that Trump’s shamelessness allowed him to survive. And yeah I do think the public was sort of browbeat into accepting these things after some failures of the attempts to thwart them for lack of anyone that seemed credible pushing back on them.
Can you imagine being kontextmaschine watching the 90s recur?