Amid Election Chaos, Communities Show Where the Real Power Is

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37155-amid-election-chaos-communities-show-where-the-real-power-is

Economic pain is the most obvious reason so many feel alienated. Many economists tell Americans we should be celebrating the recovery, but I found communities stuck in poverty and debt and lacking affordable health care, decent housing, and even safe water. We are told it is our own fault if we are struggling, even though the structure of the economy has shifted profoundly to the advantage of the superrich.

The crisis isn’t just economic, though: Racism, especially in the criminal justice system, continues to limit the future of many people of color, while climate change is drying up fertile lands and causing wildfires, floods, and extreme weather all over the country.

But in every community I visited, I found people working hard to lay a different foundation for our society.

For many reasons, the people I met distrust big transnational corporations and their ties to the political establishment. Whether because of job exports, reckless treatment of the environment, or the damage done by big box stores to local businesses, I found people everywhere looking for ways to build a different sort of economy, starting with locally rooted businesses and nonprofits, but also cooperatives, land trusts, food hubs, and urban farms.

In communities where more young people get caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline than go to college, I talked to people creating alternatives to mass incarceration by bringing restorative justice into schools and policing.

[tblue37]

1. K&R for visibility. nt

[chwaliszewski]

2. K & R

[Hortensis]

3. "Where the real power is?"

Communities blessed with good leadership have always done good things for themselves. I'm afraid, though, that the author does not sound convinced himself that America's power is actually secretly concentrated in and generated by the kinds of people and small enterprises he searched out and that they will transform both themselves and the nation. Hopeful more like.

Mostly though, I'm just really turned off by the usual small-minded meme that, by definition, people in government are bad, that no good people are in government trying to do a good job, and that progress requires trashing them all and/or doing an end run around them.

[pampango]

4. The rise of the right everywhere is due to the 'loss of legitimacy' of the establishment.

The political establishment in the United States is losing legitimacy as it fails to deliver the basic things people expect from their government: economic opportunity, security, fairness, and a viable future. When a system loses legitimacy—as did the apartheid system in South Africa and slavery in the United States—it is like the rotting of a foundation. You can’t predict when or how the structure will buckle or collapse, but you can be pretty sure that it will.

From Montana ranches to Detroit neighborhoods to Appalachian hamlets, I met people who understand that this system is failing. Donald Trump appeals to some who see the decay, but he offers nothing to build on—just hate, authoritarianism, and more power for a wealthy elite.

Bernie Sanders’ political revolution—regardless of who gets the nomination—has galvanized the yearnings of millions for a society that puts the common good ahead of corporate profits.

The stunning truth that explains the rise of the far-right in Britain and elsewhere

The same thing that's happening everywhere else. Right-wing populists are trying to make their country great again by, you guessed it, keeping immigrants out and negotiating great, and I mean great, deals. ... The other part of this is that, as de Tocqueville told us, there's nothing more dangerous than unmet expectations. ... Which is just another way of saying that it wasn't a question of how fast you were moving toward where you thought you'd be, but rather how far you were from it.

That's why it's no surprise that right-wing populism is on the march in Britain and everywhere else for that matter. People are poorer than they thought they'd be, so they don't feel like they can afford to be as generous to immigrants anymore. That's even true in the erstwhile socialist utopias of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, where the right-wing Danish People's Party, Sweden Democrats (who have their roots in neo-Nazism), and Finns Party have all risen near the top of the polls.

Today's right-wing populists, depending on your opinion of Donald Trump, aren't fascists so much as nationalists. So they might exploit racial tensions and they might be illiberal, but they probably don't want to start World War III. ... That's because immigration and globalization are both social issues as much as economic ones that have been fertile ground for nationalists regardless of the state of GDP growth.

What we're saying, then, is that there's been a baseline of right-wing populism the past 25 years as immigration has reshaped countries' identities and deindustrialization has reshaped their economies. And that it's spiked as economic growth has flatlined since 2008. The result is right-wing populist parties are, if not getting closer to power, at least setting the terms of the debate in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia, not to mention actually winning it in Hungary and Poland.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/31/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-that-explains-the-rise-of-far-right-politicians-everywhere/