CFR globalist James Traub, pictured above, of the Bloomingdale fortune calls for the elite to rise up against the ignorant masses. by the way, the elite snob is not fond of the GOP or Donald Trump.
Click the link below. Below the video is the article Traub wrote for the Foreign Policy magazine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEB62NMfy0Q
I was born in 1954, and until now I would have said that the late 1960s was the greatest period of political convulsion I have lived through. Yet for all that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle changed American culture and reshaped political parties, in retrospect those wild storms look like the normal oscillations of a relatively stable political system. The present moment is different. Today’s citizen revolt — in the United States, Britain, and Europe — may upend politics as nothing else has in my lifetime.
In the late 1960s, elites were in disarray, as
they are now — but back then they were fleeing from kids rebelling against
their parents’ world; now the elites are fleeing from the parents. Extremism
has gone mainstream. One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the
utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who
warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. British
Prime Minister David Cameron thought that voters would defer to the near-universal
opinion of experts; that only shows how utterly he misjudged his own people.
(Massa Traub assumes the so-called experts are correct. Richard Nixon and Kissinger, your so-called experts, sold the American people a bill of goods that America would sell all kinds of manufactured goods to China. How did that work out Massa Traub?)
Both
the Conservative and the Labour parties in Britain are now in crisis. The British have had their day of reckoning;
the American one looms. If Donald Trump loses, and loses badly (forgive me my
reckless optimism, but I believe he will) the Republican Party may endure a
historic split between its know-nothing base and its K Street/Chamber of
Commerce leadership class. The Socialist government of France may face a
similar fiasco in national elections next spring: Polls indicate that President François Hollande would not
even make it to the final round of voting. Right-wing parties all over Europe
are clamoring for an exit vote of their own.
Yes,
it’s possible that all the political pieces will fly up into the air and settle
down more or less where they were before, but the Brexit vote shows that
shocking change isn’t very shocking anymore. Where, then, could those pieces
end up? Europe is already pointing in one direction. In much of Europe, far-right
nativist parties lead in the polls. So far, none has mustered a majority,
though last month Norbert Hofer, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom
Party, which traffics in Nazi symbolism, came within a hair of
winning election as president. Mainstream parties of the left and right may
increasingly combine forces to keep out the nationalists (Watchman comment: Massa Traub means "The Never Trump" crowd).
This has already
happened in Sweden, where a right-of-center party serves as the minority
partner to the left-of-center government. If the Socialists in France do in
fact lose the first round, they will almost certainly support the conservative
Republicans against the far-right National Front.
Perhaps these
informal coalitions can survive until the fever breaks. But the imperative of
cohabitation could also lead to genuine realignment. That is, chunks of parties
from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of
center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective
governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not
hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the
British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the
angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of
Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their
ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only
alternative to irrelevance.
The issue, at bottom,
is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that
political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces and
thus the demand that someone, somehow, restore the status quo ante. It may seem
strange that the reaction has come today rather than immediately after the
economic crisis of 2008, but the ebbing of the crisis has led to a new sense of
stagnation. With prospects of flat growth in Europe and minimal income growth
in the United States, voters are rebelling against their dismal long-term
prospects. And globalization means culture as well as economics: Older people
whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and
multicultural celebrations are waving their fists at cosmopolitan elites. I was
recently in Poland, where a far-right party appealing to nationalism and
tradition has gained power despite years of undeniable prosperity under a
centrist regime. Supporters use the same words again and again to explain their
vote: “values and tradition.” They voted for Polishness against the modernity
of Western Europe.
Perhaps politics will
realign itself around the axis of globalization, with the fist-shakers on one
side and the pragmatists on the other. The nationalists would win the loyalty
of working-class and middle-class whites who see themselves as the defenders of
sovereignty. The reformed center would include the beneficiaries of
globalization and the poor and non-white and marginal citizens who recognize
that the celebration of national identity excludes them. (Watchman comment: Massa Traub, I doubt non-white, marginal citizens consider themselves beneficiaries of globalism. I think they view them as peasants working on and in a global feudal plantation for billionaire thugs like you Massa.
You want them to stoop and fetch Massa while you get paid to write your elite articles for the One World Government Council on Foreign Relations, The Center On International cooperation and the New York Times magazine. As Nigel Farage has said about people like you, I doubt you have ever had a real job where you had to sweat as in Asian sweat shop, a Middle East oil field, a railroad, unloading airplane baggage or casting metal in a foundry.)
Of
course, mainstream parties of both the left and the right are trying to reach
the angry nationalists. Sometimes this takes the form of gross truckling, as
when Nicolas Sarkozy, who is seeking to regain France’s presidency, denounces the “tyranny of minorities” and invokes the
“forever France” of an all-white past. From the left, Hillary Clinton has
jettisoned her free-trade past to appeal to union members and others who want
to protect national borders against the global market. But left and right
disagree so deeply about how best to cushion the effects of globalization, and
how to deal with the vast influx of refugees and migrants, that even the threat
of extremism may not be enough to bring them to make common cause.
The schism we see opening before us is not
just about policies, but about reality. The Brexit forces won because
cynical leaders were prepared to cater to voters’ paranoia, lying to them about
the dangers of immigration and the costs of membership in the EU. (Watchman comment: the voters weren't lied to, they were fed up Massa Traub. Hell, it is getting difficult to find an Englishman in London.) Some of those
leaders have already begun to admit that they were lying. Donald Trump
has, of course, set a new standard for disingenuousness and catering to voters’
fears, whether over immigration or foreign trade or anything else he can think
of. Watchman comment: Oh, I guess O'bomber and Hillary don't lie! Give me a break Massa Traub.) The Republican Party, already rife with science-deniers and economic
reality-deniers, has thrown itself into the embrace of a man who fabricates
realities that ignorant people like to inhabit.
Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I
did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of
leadership is to un-delude them. Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have
become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction
that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of
history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the
party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that
is the coming realignment, we should embrace it.
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