Dave Farber
2018-07-01 00:22:58 UTC
Date: July 1, 2018 at 00:22:09 GMT+9
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
By Thomas L. Friedman
Jun 26 2018â
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/opinion/political-parties-climate.html>
If you havenât already noticed, let me be the first on your block to point it out: The big mainstream political parties across the industrialized world are all blowing up at once. Itâs quite extraordinary.
The U.S. Republican Party has blown up in all but name, going overnight from an internationalist, free-trade, deficit-hawk party to a protectionist, anti-immigrant, deficit-dove party â all to accommodate the instincts of Donald Trump and his base.
As the former House Speaker John Boehner noted: âThere is no Republican Party. Thereâs a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.â Actually, itâs dead, but itâs not alone in the cemetery.
Italyâs last election ended with its mainstream center-left getting crushed, bringing to power instead a coalition of far-left, far-right populists, whose focus ranges from guaranteeing minimum income for Italyâs 11 percent unemployed to rebuffing immigrants and the European Union.
Britainâs Labour Party has gone from center-left to quasi-Marxist. And the Brexit-loving Tories, having pushed Britain to exit the E.U. without any plan, are now divided and paralyzed over how to implement the economic suicide theyâve promised voters.
The U.S. Democrats are fractured between a Bernie Sanders quasi-socialist wing and a center-left wing, but are glued together for now â thank goodness â by the overriding need to defeat Trump. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took four months to form a barely coherent governing coalition, after her ruling party got hammered in the last election â and that fragile coalition may soon implode over immigration tensions. And French President Emmanuel Macron leads a centrist party that did not exist three years ago.
As Quartz noted, the French Socialist Party âwent from running the country to receiving just 6 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections last year.â In the Netherlands, the Labor Party has been decimated, going from 25 percent of the vote in 2012, and governing in a coalition, to just 6 percent in last yearâs general election.
Whatâs going on? My short answer: climate change â but not just the one you think. Weâre actually going through three climate changes at once, and together they are reshaping the ecosystems of work, learning, geopolitics, ethics and community in ways that parties built on our old left-right binary choices can no longer easily contain.
How so? Weâre going through a change in the climate of the climate: Weâre going from later to now. When I was growing up in Minnesota, later was when I could clean that lake, save that forest or rescue that endangered owl. Today later is officially over. Later will now be too late, so whatever youâre going to save, save it now. Thatâs a climate change.
Weâre going through a change in the climate of globalization: Weâre going from an interconnected world to an interdependent world. In an interdependent world your friends can kill you faster than your enemies. If banks in Greece or Italy â both NATO allies â go under tonight, your retirement fund will feel it. And in an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China takes six more islands in the South China Sea tonight, you wonât lose sleep; if China loses 6 percent growth tonight, you could lose your job.
Lastly, weâre going through a change in the climate of technology. Machines are acquiring most of the unique attributes of humans â particularly the ability to learn, analyze, reason, maneuver and drive on their own.
From 1960 to 2000, Quartz reported, U.S. manufacturing employment stayed roughly steady at around 17.5 million jobs. But between 2000 and 2010, thanks largely to digitization and automation, âmanufacturing employment plummeted by more than a third,â which was âworse than any decade in U.S. manufacturing history.â And weâve digitized only about 20 percent of the economy, meaning thereâs tremendous technological climate change yet ahead.
These climate changes are reshaping the ecosystem of work â wiping out huge numbers of middle-skilled jobs â and this is reshaping the ecosystem of learning, making lifelong learning the new baseline for advancement.
These three climate changes are also reshaping geopolitics. They are like a hurricane that is blowing apart weak nations that were O.K. in the Cold War â when superpowers would shower them with foreign aid and arms, when China could not compete with them for low-skilled work and when climate change, deforestation and population explosions had not wiped out vast amounts of their small-scale agriculture.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
By Thomas L. Friedman
Jun 26 2018â
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/opinion/political-parties-climate.html>
If you havenât already noticed, let me be the first on your block to point it out: The big mainstream political parties across the industrialized world are all blowing up at once. Itâs quite extraordinary.
The U.S. Republican Party has blown up in all but name, going overnight from an internationalist, free-trade, deficit-hawk party to a protectionist, anti-immigrant, deficit-dove party â all to accommodate the instincts of Donald Trump and his base.
As the former House Speaker John Boehner noted: âThere is no Republican Party. Thereâs a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.â Actually, itâs dead, but itâs not alone in the cemetery.
Italyâs last election ended with its mainstream center-left getting crushed, bringing to power instead a coalition of far-left, far-right populists, whose focus ranges from guaranteeing minimum income for Italyâs 11 percent unemployed to rebuffing immigrants and the European Union.
Britainâs Labour Party has gone from center-left to quasi-Marxist. And the Brexit-loving Tories, having pushed Britain to exit the E.U. without any plan, are now divided and paralyzed over how to implement the economic suicide theyâve promised voters.
The U.S. Democrats are fractured between a Bernie Sanders quasi-socialist wing and a center-left wing, but are glued together for now â thank goodness â by the overriding need to defeat Trump. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took four months to form a barely coherent governing coalition, after her ruling party got hammered in the last election â and that fragile coalition may soon implode over immigration tensions. And French President Emmanuel Macron leads a centrist party that did not exist three years ago.
As Quartz noted, the French Socialist Party âwent from running the country to receiving just 6 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections last year.â In the Netherlands, the Labor Party has been decimated, going from 25 percent of the vote in 2012, and governing in a coalition, to just 6 percent in last yearâs general election.
Whatâs going on? My short answer: climate change â but not just the one you think. Weâre actually going through three climate changes at once, and together they are reshaping the ecosystems of work, learning, geopolitics, ethics and community in ways that parties built on our old left-right binary choices can no longer easily contain.
How so? Weâre going through a change in the climate of the climate: Weâre going from later to now. When I was growing up in Minnesota, later was when I could clean that lake, save that forest or rescue that endangered owl. Today later is officially over. Later will now be too late, so whatever youâre going to save, save it now. Thatâs a climate change.
Weâre going through a change in the climate of globalization: Weâre going from an interconnected world to an interdependent world. In an interdependent world your friends can kill you faster than your enemies. If banks in Greece or Italy â both NATO allies â go under tonight, your retirement fund will feel it. And in an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China takes six more islands in the South China Sea tonight, you wonât lose sleep; if China loses 6 percent growth tonight, you could lose your job.
Lastly, weâre going through a change in the climate of technology. Machines are acquiring most of the unique attributes of humans â particularly the ability to learn, analyze, reason, maneuver and drive on their own.
From 1960 to 2000, Quartz reported, U.S. manufacturing employment stayed roughly steady at around 17.5 million jobs. But between 2000 and 2010, thanks largely to digitization and automation, âmanufacturing employment plummeted by more than a third,â which was âworse than any decade in U.S. manufacturing history.â And weâve digitized only about 20 percent of the economy, meaning thereâs tremendous technological climate change yet ahead.
These climate changes are reshaping the ecosystem of work â wiping out huge numbers of middle-skilled jobs â and this is reshaping the ecosystem of learning, making lifelong learning the new baseline for advancement.
These three climate changes are also reshaping geopolitics. They are like a hurricane that is blowing apart weak nations that were O.K. in the Cold War â when superpowers would shower them with foreign aid and arms, when China could not compete with them for low-skilled work and when climate change, deforestation and population explosions had not wiped out vast amounts of their small-scale agriculture.
[snip]
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