Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Conservatism

  • Trump Enabling Far-Right Takeover of Republican Party: Clinton

    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned on Thursday that her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, is enabling a far-right takeover of the Republican Party.

    The Democrat argued in a speech delivered in Reno, Nevada that Trump is part of a wider “alternative right” movement that includes British Euroskeptics and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

    “The names may have changed,” she said.

    Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.

    Trump — “a man,” according to Clinton, “with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet” — surrounds himself with these people.

    Only last week, he appointed Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, a far-right “news” site, as his campaign chief. (more…)

  • Conservatives Come to Terms with What They’ve Done

    The one good thing that may come of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is an awareness on the American right that it has done real damage to the Republican Party and indeed the country.

    Not all conservatives are ready to admit that Trump is the end of the line for a movement that has for decades fed off people’s anxieties and undermined their faith in institutions. But for some, Trump is making clear what the politics of grievance and anti-government can lead to.

    A spat between two right-wing commentators — Sean Hannity of Fox News and Bret Stephens of the The Wall Street Journal — is a preview of the blood feud we can expect on the right post-November if indeed Trump loses the election.

    Hannity has preemptively blamed center-right Republicans, arguing that the likes of House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate leader Mitch McConnell have been harsher on Trump “than they’ve ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda.”

    He said on his radio show, “You created Donald Trump, all of you. Because of your ineffectiveness, because of your weakness, your spinelessness, your lack of vision, your inability to fight Obama.” (more…)

  • The Rajoy School of Political Science

    Mariano Rajoy
    Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy looks out the window of a cable car in Sóller, Majorca, June 22 (PP)

    Napoleon famously regarded luck as the most important quality in his generals. We may need to apply the same thinking to politics, or at least Spanish politics.

    Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy seems to be developing an entire political theory based around luck.

    He would not put it quite like that. He would presumably argue that his continued success against all the odds is down to his political acumen and skills. But that is not how others see it. (more…)

  • How America Earned Donald Trump

    From Coney Island apartment tower lord to Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump has come a long way. But nobody should assume the man has remade America: rather, his success is not in changing Americans but following the most profitable trends.

    His real estate empire was built upon a New York City ready to renew itself at nearly any cost: his real estate deals capitalized on the frantic rebuilding of much of the city’s decayed infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s. He set up casinos in New Jersey; he made himself into a reality TV star. He didn’t create such conditions but rather exploited them.

    And this tendency explains virtually all his successes. Trump is not a man who invents trends: he exploits them. Now he is exploiting the Republican Party and the American electorate and Americans have no one but themselves to blame. (more…)

  • Berlusconi’s Party Splits After Failure to Bring Down Government

    Disagreement within former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party looks certain to divide the Italian right into a new conservative party and a more liberal group, both derived from the media tycoon’s Il Popolo della Libertà.

    Berlusconi long maintained a solid grip over his party but faced overt opposition when he proposed to quit the government of Enrico Letta last month. Many conservatives were unwilling to link his judicial struggles — Berlusconi was convicted for tax fraud in his media empire — with the stability of the ruling coalition. His deputy, Angelino Alfano, and four other conservative ministers initially resigned from Letta’s cabinet but later turned against their leader with the support of more than twenty senators, forcing Berlusconi into a humiliating retreat.

    The episode was the first interruption in Berlusconi’s twenty year-long domination of Italy’s right-wing politics and paved the way for a definitive split between the “government doves” and “loyalist hawks.” (more…)

  • Britain’s Conservatives Could Win Trade Union Support

    When Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, she was helped into Downing Street by what many of today’s politicians would regard as an unlikely group of Tory voters. The votes of trade unionists were crucial to Thatcher beating Jim Callaghan that year.

    Yet she was not the first Conservative leader to be in favor with the unions and those who belong to them. It was Edward Smith-Stanley, the Earl of Derby who, encouraged by Benjamin Disraeli, as with the 1867 Reform Act, legalized trade unions in 1867. Disraeli’s government, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Liberals, later legalized picketing and increased the power of workers to enforce contracts. Given that this was part of an impressive batch of social reform, it’s little wonder that an early Labour-Liberal parliamentarian commented, “the Tories have done more for the working class in five years than the Liberals did in fifty.”

    Today, only a third of trade union members consistently votes Conservative. That number could be higher if the party looked to appeal to the majority of moderate trade unionists who have no sympathy with the political grandstanding of their leaders. Polling by Lord Ashcroft shows that, on many issues, such as a social benefit cap or a right to buy scheme — whereby social housing tenants are allowed to purchase there homes from the government — the instincts of most union members are pretty right-wing. (more…)

  • German Ideological Revival Polarizes Western Politics

    “Now Europe speaks German,” declared Volker Kauder, a member of Germany’s ruling conservative party, in late 2011. Despite the scolding he earned for his remarks, he was only slightly off. Not only Europe, indeed the world speaks increasingly with a German voice. Not literally, of course, but philosophically. German ideas are emerging as powerful forces all around the globe, ringing the bell for the end of the Anglo-Saxon moment in history.

    Critics and defenders of contemporary capitalism in the United States both speak the language of German history. Those who seek to emulate the European welfare state regularly invoke the German model while those who condemn these leftist ideas emphasize the necessity of self-reliance and labor as the fundamental glue of society and the indispensable source of individual dignity.

    The irony of this debate is that while the former claim to be ideological descendants of Karl Marx, it is the latter who use his arguments in the truest sense. For Marx, labor was the essence of human existence. Men could only be men through work which enabled him to interact with nature and create a world according to his imagination. (more…)

  • Can the BJP Move India to the Right?

    With India’s budget session scheduled for the last days of February it’s time to have a look at the way the country’s main opposition party — and probably India’s only right-wing political party — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will use the session.

    There’s no doubt that the BJP is on a juggernaut after winning the most recent state elections in Bihar along with its ally the Janata Dal by almost a fourth-fifth majority. The Congress-led United Progressive government has boosted the morale of the opposition with its indifference to essential governance coupled with corruption charges against several of its cabinet ministers who were forced to resign. But the bigger question is whether Indian voters will shift to the right.

    The BJP has adopted an aggressive strategy to win over voters, both in parliament and during the seasonal yatras (pilgrimages) it conducts. The most recent one in India’s northernmost state, involved hoisting India’s tricolor at Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir on the eve of the Republic Day, January 26. Prominent members of the party, including the opposition leaders in both houses of parliament and former party leader Rajnath Singh were arrested and detained.

    The well orchestrated show was both a success and failure with the former in tactics and the latter in strategy. Any political organization needs to have efficient tacticians who can organize an efficient rally but it should also have leaders who can effectively communicate the overall political objective of conducting either a rally or meeting. The BJP has failed in understanding or at least communicating a broader political strategy.

    This has been a problem of the party’s for many years. It has failed to grasp the attention of voters and not yet come to terms with its defeat in the general elections of 2004. As a result, it lost additional seats in the elections of 2009 despite a change in leadership.

    At the same time, the BJP has done well in state elections in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. The people trust the party and its leaders to provide good governance.

    The Congress’ mistakes have irritated many Indians but it is not enough for the BJP to be merely reactionary. Whereas on the local level, people have been disillusioned with the ruling party and vote for a change or continuance if the incumbent BJP government performs well, nationally, the party fails to articulate big ideas. Its leaders have not been able to translate their party’s message into campaign rhetoric very effectively. This is why the majority of the people, especially in the middle class, see the BJP as a party worth of being in opposition but not one that should return to government yet.

    In India’s democracy, leaders who are able to articulate their views in a nuanced and decent fashion will find widespread support. It is why India had Indira Gandhi as prime minister. The political maturity she represented is lacking within today’s BJP leadership. India’s growing professional middle class, which generally has more liberal views, is wary of the sort of partisan politics that seem to be on the rise instead.

    Until 2004, Atal Bihari Vajpayee provided the BJP with moderate and charismatic leadership but his withdrawal from active politics has left a space for pronounced right-wings politics — which should not be confused with the BJP’s own version of jingoism or Hindu nationalism. Unless the party recognizes this opportunity, it will likely repeat the mistakes of the past two general elections when the world’s largest democracy votes in 2014.

  • The Far Right’s Revival in France

    One of the things that was taken out of the 2007 French presidential election was the collapse of the far right (the Front national or FN), the same far right which five years earlier had shocked the world and France by placing second in the presidential race with 16.9 percent of the vote. Its poor 10.4 percent showing in 2007 was followed by a drubbing in subsequent legislative elections and an equally weak showing in the 2009 European elections.

    It has rightfully been said that Nicolas Sarkozy took a lot of the far-right vote in 2007 with his tough law and order platform and populist rhetoric. It helped him with working-class voters, many of whom had supported the FN in 2002 despite their left-wing roots.

    Following the party’s collapse, which put it on the verge of bankruptcy and forced it to sell off its headquarters in an affluent Parisian suburb, the far right was buried. Sarkozy and the traditional right had permanently integrated most of the FN’s electorate, and it would collapse following the inevitable retirement of its historical lider maximo, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

    It turns out that the far right was buried far too early and the party that passed for dead or at least moribund four years ago is roaring back with a vengeance. (more…)

  • Glenn Beck’s Appeal to Restore Honor

    On August 28, American news commentator Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to a crowd of several hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. The following day Beck appeared on Fox News Sunday to talk about the event.

    When asked about the rally and its message, Beck insisted that it was nothing political, but instead a matter of faith. According to Beck, it’s because of a lack of faith that America is in trouble. It is up to the American people to fix it. “Every American has a role,” he said. “Whether you’re Democrat, Republican, independent, it doesn’t matter. We all know the country’s in trouble. We may disagree on how to solve it, but we all know the country’s in trouble.”

    Asked about the controversy of the rally’s date, which coincided with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream speech”, Beck claimed that it was merely a coincidence, but that he has since come to regard it as divine providence in order to reclaim the civil rights movement. Racial politics, said Beck, was — and is — one of the greatest problems with the country, but race has no place in politics.

    Beck’s argument is that the civil rights movement should be remembered as a cause for justice; a justice which both Democrats and Republicans have twisted into tools to meet their own ends.

    When hundreds of thousands of people appear in one place for one reason, Glenn Beck said that it was a sign of people being unhappy, largely because justice and faith are absent from national politics and indeed, American society at large.

  • Brain Dead Conservatism

    In The Washington Post, Steven Hayward lays out his argument that conservatism has become a brain-dead movement:

    Consider the “tea party” phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the “birthers” have become the “grassy knollers” of the right; their obsession with Obama’s origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism. (Does anyone really think that if evidence existed of Obama’s putative foreign birth, Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t have found it 18 months ago?) (more…)