From Europe.... (1)

For educational purposes only:

Oh dear! The "best people" have
turned against "the worst".


Not that I buy all in this article but,
still, it is rather interesting.
This is quite long - but, it might be
educational - especially to the
Eurosoc elitists.

Note: For those not *that* conversant
with the English language - the term
"spiked" generally refers to an article
that the editor or editorial board (or
in russkieland - Putka) does not want
to see the light of day. I am not familiar
with that English publication.

Last note: Due to the length of the
article I shall split it in half - thus there
will be:

>From Europe.... (1)
>From Europe.... (2)

Best - - Henry

From: "Spiked"
(via Arts and letters daily)
By: Frank Furedi
Essay13 June 2005


>From Europe to America: the populist moment
has arrived

On both sides of the Atlantic, the political class has
become convinced that the people do not know what
is best for them.

At first sight, opponents of the EU Constitution appear to
have very little in common. In France, campaigners for
'Non' often sought to defend their system of welfare
arrangements against an institution that they believe has
come under Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal domination. British
eurosceptics oppose the bureaucratic and regulatory
ambitions of Brussels. In Holland, some 'Nee' campaigners
feared the loss of their national identity and the entry of
Turkey into the EU. Others used the referendum to simply
have a pop at their political representatives.

The incoherence of the populist reaction against the EU has
been seized upon by EU technocrats to call into question the
validity of the referendums that rejected Brussels. From the
perspective of the Brussels technocrat, the overwhelming
rejection of the EU Constitution by the French and Dutch
electorates is merely the confusing signal transmitted by a
politically illiterate electorate. Along with sections of the
media, pro-EU campaigners often represent this rebuff of
the EU as both irrational and incoherent.

The movement against the EU has brought together old
political foes from the left and right, far- left opponents
of a 'capitalist' Europe and far-right nationalists who are
suspicious of anything that is remotely foreign. Since the
marriage of convenience between such disparate forces
cannot last, some supporters of the EU feel entitled to
minimise the significance of the rejection of the EU
Constitution.

However, to interpret the outcome of the French and Dutch
referendums as having little to do with popular attitudes
towards the EU is an exercise in self-delusion. How human
beings vote is never a simple, straightforward matter. People
do not simply respond to a script handed down from above
and vote in accordance with the instructions set out by the
political classes; their voting behaviour is influenced by a
variety of motives and emotions. Sometimes people cast a
ballot to vote positively for something they desire, and
sometimes their vote represents a negative act of thwarting
their political masters.

Teaching 'them' a lesson has an honourable tradition for a
democratic electorate, as even the likes of Winston Churchill
discovered. Voting is not simply about saying yes or no; it is
also about making a statement. It can represent a call to
arms, or it can be a cry for help. All these complex and
contradictory influences should not detract from the fact
that when people voted 'No' to the EU Constitution they
actually meant 'No', and were expressing their opposition
to the treaty.

Supporters of the EU treaty should not draw comfort from
the fact that their opponents are driven by a variety of
different and contradictory motives. The fact that French
communists and the French far right have very different
attitudes on many issues does not necessarily diminish the
significance of the populist reaction against the EU. It
may actually mean that as we move into the twenty-first
century, the traditional division between left and right
has lost some of its significance.

It is worth noting that while campaigners against the EU
Constitution promoted diverse issues, they all expressed
a sense of estrangement from their political institutions.
Today, this response is often motivated by a sense of
disengagement and a mood of anti-politics. It also frequently
expresses a revolt against the values upheld by the political
class and its institutions. The lower classes embrace values
that are essentially focused on their nation and community,
while the elites are oriented towards a cosmopolitan and
globalist perspective. In France, those who voted 'No'
came predominantly from the lower classes, and the most
enthusiastic supporters of the 'Yes' campaign were members
of the French cultural, economic and political elites.


The referendum was as much a clash of values - what in
the USA is called a Culture War - as a conflict over what
constitutes legitimate authority. People are bemused by
the managerial and instrumental language of EU
technocrats. And importantly, they believe that the EU
is not of their making. By their very existence, movements
such as the Dutch 'Nee' campaign draw attention to
the lack of legitimacy of the focus of their opposition.
It is not surprising that the emotional and political
distance that separates the public from their representatives
has acquired a particularly intense character around the EU.

Those who are genuinely interested in European unity
need to engage with the sense of disenchantment expressed
by the French and Dutch electorates. Ensuring that people
feel at home in Europe is far more important than cajoling
people to accept another top-down diktat from Brussels.
And this means, first of all, rejecting the anti-democratic
assumptions and prejudices behind the political elite's
reaction to the 'No' vote.

Demonising the people

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the populist rejection
of the EU treaty, the manner in which the 'No' campaign
is disparaged by professional politicians betrays a powerful
anti-democratic temper. It appears that professional
politicians attempt to account for their isolation from the
electorate by pointing their finger at the incompetence of
the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, the political class
has drawn the conclusion that the problem with the people
is that they do not know what's in their best interest. This
sentiment is particularly widespread among liberal and left-
wing activists and thinkers.

'People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what
American political life is all about', notes Thomas Frank in
his US bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas? How
Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Otherwise, Frank
argues, how could they possibly vote for the Republicans?
The belief that people are too stupid to understand the
complexities of public life was also widely expressed during
the heated exchanges that surrounded the recent referendums
on the EU in France and Germany. Margot Wallstrom, vice
president of the EU, commented on her blog that the
Constitution is a 'complex issue to vote on', which can lead
many citizens to 'use a referendum to answer a question that
was not put to them'.

According to this view, since the people cannot be trusted
to understand the finer points of legal documents, important
decisions need to be left to the professional politician. Andrew
Duff, Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament
(MEP), agrees that consulting the electorate is a distraction
from getting on with the job. After the referendums in France
and Holland, he stated that 'the experience begs the question
of whether it was ever appropriate to submit the EU
Constitution to a lottery of uncoordinated national plebiscites'.

The people are not only regarded as politically illiterate. They
are also depicted as simpletons who are likely to be swayed by
demagogues. In the context of the Brussels bubble, a demagogue
is anyone who is critical of the EU project. As far as European
Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso was concerned,
his eurosceptic opponents have crossed the 'border from
democracy to demagoguery'. He claimed that a 'populist trend'
is seeking to 'undermine the Europe we are trying
to build' by 'simplifying important and complex subjects'.

In the USA, this sentiment has been systematically articulated
by Democratic Party activists, who cannot understand why
many blue-collar workers vote for Republicans. According to
George Lakoff, one of the most influential thinkers in the liberal
wing of the Democrats, 'people do not necessarily vote in their
self interest'.

The belief that the public is too simplistic or too gullible has led
some Democratic Party activists to blame the defeat of their
presidential candidate in two successive elections on the stupidity
of the people. One liberal activist, Michael Gronewalter, states
that 'civility and intelligent dialogue are useful tools among
intelligent people' but are inappropriate for engaging with the
public. He argues:

'I really think the problem is that we liberals are in general far
more intelligent, well-reasoned and educated and will go to
astonishingly great lengths to convince people of the integrity
and validity of our fair and well thought-out arguments. The
audience, in case anyone has been paying attention, isn't always
getting it! I suspect the problem is not the speaker - it is
most of the audience.'

'The audience', which is another name for normal human beings,
is implicitly blamed for not getting the incredibly sophisticated
message articulated by very clever political activists. In recent
times, this apparently hopeless mass of illiterate voters has been
condemned for mindlessly embracing the politics of the so-called
religious right.

In the USA, the left's apprehension with the growing influence
of the religious right is motivated by the suspicion that it finds
it difficult to connect with the emotional and cultural life of
ordinary folk. But instead of attempting to overcome this
barrier, it prefers to dwell on the irrationalism of those who
can be so easily swayed by the religious right. In a roundabout
way, the left's denunciation of the religious right represents a
critique of the mental capacity of significant sections of the
electorate.

According to one Democratic Party activist, the American
public has become a sort of 'fast food electorate' and it is as
if 'Americans suffer collectively from a plague of Attention
Deficit Disorder'. In the EU this recalcitrant public is dismissed
as a bunch of backward-looking xenophobes. After the
rejection of the EU treaty by the French and Dutch electorates,
the Liberal Democratic MEP Andrew Duff's characterisation
of the opponents of the EU Constitution was neither liberal
nor democratic. 'The rejectionists are an odd bunch of racists,
xenophobes, nationalists, communists, disappointed centre-left
and the generally pissed-off', he told Parliament Magazine.

Throughout history the political elites have tended to be anxious
and sometimes hostile to public opinion. Most of the classical
studies of public opinion, especially those written from a liberal
perspective, tend to be negative about their subject matter.
Often, it is the liberal disappointment with the inability of the
people to do what is in their interest that shapes the discussion,
in which public opinion is invariably treated as a 'problem'.
The American commentator Walter Lippman's 1922 study,
Public Opinion, provides the classic statement: he warns that
the proportion of the electorate which is 'absolutely illiterate'
is much larger than we suspect and that these people who
are 'mentally children or barbarians' are natural targets of
manipulators.

This view of public opinion has dominated the Anglo-American
literature on the subject. Frequently it has conveyed the
patronising assumption that the public does not know
what is in its best interest. As Edward Pager, an American
sociologist, argued in 1929, 'public opinion is often very
cruel to those who struggle most unselfishly for the public
welfare'.

So the tendency to stigmatise populist politics as a symptom
of psychological disorder and irrationalism has a long history.
In his important study The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin
notes that in the USA during the Cold War, populism became
the 'great fear of liberal intellectuals'. They blamed mass
democracy and an 'authoritarian' and 'irrational' working class
for the rise of McCarthyism. Indeed, their hostility to
McCarthyism, like their antagonism to the religious right
today, was underpinned by distrust and antipathy towards 'the
very kinds of white American-Catholic workers, military
veterans, discontented families in the middle of the social
structure - who had once been the foot soldiers in causes
such as industrial unionism, the CIO and the Popular Front
in the 1930s and 1940s'. A decade later, these people
were perceived as the enemy of liberalism.

Whereas 'formerly liberals had worried about the decline
of popular participation in politics', now 'they began to
wonder whether "apathy" might not be a blessing in
disguise' notes Christopher Lasch in The True And Only
Heaven, his study of the populist revolt against the liberal
elite.

Elite apprehensions towards populism were linked to the
belief that the mental outlook of the 'lower classes' was
distorted by their brutal upbringing. It was claimed that
the emotional outlook of the working class created a
propensity to adopt anti-democratic and authoritarian
causes. The comments of the American political scientist
Seymour Martin Lipset, a leading voice on this subject
during the Cold War, is paradigmatic in this respect:
'to sum up, the lower-class individual is likely to have
been exposed to punishment, lack of love, and a general
atmosphere of tension and aggression since early
childhood - all experiences which tend to produce deep-rooted
hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice, political
authoritarianism, and chiliastic transvaluational religion.'


A contrast between the emotionally refined middle classes
and the emotionally illiterate working classes was also
forcefully drawn by Hans Eysenck, a well-known British
psychologist. Eysenck claimed that 'middle-class
Conservatives are more tender-minded than working-class
Conservatives; middle-class Liberals more tender-minded
than working-class Liberals; middle-class Socialists more
tender-minded than working-class Socialists, and even
middle-class Communists more tender minded than
working-class Communists'.


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