Why arent you standing in solidarity with fat black american flesh within the zeitgeist or ever consider disabled white kids that need your respect/attention, they are people to? Why dont you understand aesthetic psychoanalysis and write a blog on it? I consider that to be racist, we are trying to stop israel from bombing you yet you don't talk about our problems or stand in solidarity with us? Why should we care about you if you dont care about me?

You know I been thinking about how at one point celebrity culture was seen as the pinnacle of social aspiration in everyday society-flash, cars, clothes, lifestyle, excess, so much vapid junk

But then I also had an epiphany as well about that with Andrew Tate and how the dude cosplays as an ascetic/descipline monk when the dude is the literal definition of a Western consumer

But under capitalism this is an unfortunate after-effect of the raw consequence of valuing rationality and logical effeciency over social morale and human-centeredness

This can then explain why people are arguably losing their social decorum at such an unprecedented rate while the rigidity treadmill of modern society has only gotten worse

Is like the social logic of what makes you a "trustworthy" person isn't moral character anymore, it is bureaucratic assesment

Max Weber's Age of Rationalization basically

Which is where I would argue a lot of the social and political polarization of modern society may stem from

The biggest irony here of course is that "as long your bills are paid" and own property, you can virtually get away now with even more socially deranged behavior nowadays than before
Is almost like capitalism at its latest stage it's creating a turbo vacuum of moral blankism where people are seen as systems first rather than your neighbor

Thoughts?

Between this and the Falklands issue being pushed again, does anyone else think this might symbolise a big breakdown in the relationship between the US/Israeli/Argentinian axis and the UK? Will we see the special relationship crumble or is this just performative by everyone involved?

I just read Roger Hallam's argument for why the populist right is going to fail.

I am impressed.

I have rarely seen someone spend this much time discussing populism while demonstrating so little comprehension of what populism actually is.

The article is called "It's the Culture, Stupid: Why the Populist Right Will Fail."

The basic argument appears to be that the right has nasty hierarchical people and insufficiently wholesome organizational culture while the left has discovered the revolutionary power of being nice to one another in meetings.

This is apparently the intellectual vanguard of the coming "left populist alternative."

Let's begin with the author's understanding of mass movements.

Okay.

And?

Since when does "lots of people participated" equal "populist"?

A football game can involve tens of thousands of people. A Taylor Swift concert can involve tens of thousands of people. A university football game can involve tens of thousands of people.

None of these things are populist movements.

Populism has something to do with who constitutes "the people," who constitutes "the elite" and what political conflict exists between them.

And then the article accidentally makes my argument for me.

The author admits that these networks were:

My brother in Christ.

You just described the educated managerial class.

You cannot tell me that your environmental activist organization is overwhelmingly composed of young middle-class people and then expect "we had tens of thousands of participants" to magically transform it into a working-class populist movement.

You have described your constituency.

Then you forgot to ask why the constituency is what it is.

"Stop Oil" and the Working Man

This becomes particularly funny with Just Stop Oil.

You want to make an argument about populism while advocating the abolition of one of the most fundamental inputs into modern industrial civilization.

Oil isn't some luxury product consumed exclusively by evil capitalists.

Oil moves trucks.

Oil moves ships.

Oil moves airplanes.

Oil produces plastics.

Oil supports manufacturing.

Oil supports agriculture.

Oil supports construction.

Oil supports logistics.

Oil supports millions of jobs.

And it is consumed by ordinary people.

If you want to build a genuinely populist environmental movement, you eventually have to walk into a room with the truck driver, refinery worker, mechanic, farmer and construction worker and explain what your energy policy does to his cost of living.

You don't get to define "the people" as the people who already agree with you.

That's called an echo chamber.

The Great Revolutionary Power of Being Nice

The author's proposed solution is even better.

Apparently former XR and Just Stop Oil activists should bring their superior organizational culture into wider local communities and Green/left networks.

This is the equivalent of a guy from the Harvard student government announcing that America can be saved if everyone learns better committee etiquette.

The author has identified the problem as:

"Our meetings aren't sufficiently nice."

Meanwhile the populist right is talking about:

• wages
• immigration
• housing
• industrial decline
• energy
• globalization
• national sovereignty
• the administrative state
• cultural alienation
• declining social status
• the cost of living

But sure.

Check-ins.

The Right Is Apparently Held Together by One Angry Man

Then we get to the author's theory of the right.

He claims:

Except what happens when the leader isn't there?

The answer is apparently:

MAGA evaporates.

This is an interesting theory because there are already multiple politicians who represent substantial portions of the contemporary Republican coalition without being carbon copies of Trump.

Marco Rubio.

J.D. Vance.

Ron DeSantis.

Whatever one thinks of these politicians, they aren't exactly interchangeable with Trump.

And the more important question isn't whether the next Republican leader will possess Trump's personality.

The question is whether the political constituency survives the personality.

A political realignment doesn't necessarily disappear because its most famous politician leaves the stage.

The author seems to have confused a political movement with a cult of personality.

"The Far Right"

Then there is my favorite analytical device:

the far right.

He uses the term repeatedly.

He never adequately defines it.

Trump is far right.

Farage is far right.

The Republican movement is apparently far right.

Eventually there are going to be "real fascists."

Okay.

Define the terms.

What exactly distinguishes:

• conservative
• right-wing
• populist right
• radical right
• far right
• authoritarian
• fascist

?

If you're going to tell me that Trump and Farage are merely the gateway drug to "real fascists," I would appreciate at least a definition of fascism before we get to the fascism.

Otherwise "far right" becomes a useful little rhetorical bucket into which you throw anything you dislike.

And Then RFK Jr. Shows Up in My Head

The author's description of the Republican Party as a nest of Machiavellian power seekers is particularly amusing when you remember Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s trajectory.

Kennedy spent years attacking the Republican establishment.

Then he joined Trump's administration and became Secretary of Health and Human Services.

He even discussed his previous perceptions of the Republican Party and political power on Joe Rogan.

This doesn't prove that every Republican is secretly wonderful.

It does demonstrate that political coalitions are considerably more complicated than:

good people = our movement

nasty power-hungry people = their movement

People move.

Coalitions move.

Political parties change.

Individuals change.

And sometimes people who spent years despising a political coalition discover that the coalition contains people with whom they have considerably more political agreement than they expected.

Reality is annoyingly complicated like that.

The Big Finish

And then Hallam arrives at the grand finale.

The populist right will fail.

And when the Farages and Trumps of the world fail:

That's the hook?

Vote for us or fascists.

We've seen this movie before.

Except he hasn't actually established the causal chain.

Trump fails.

Therefore fascists.

Farage fails.

Therefore fascists.

Why?

How?

Through what mechanism?

What constituency?

What organization?

What ideology?

What political conditions?

Nothing.

It's simply:

The Bad Right will eventually become the Really Bad Right, therefore support my movement.

That isn't a theory of political development.

That's a threat dressed up as analysis.

The Actual Irony

The most ironic part is that Hallam is explicitly calling for a left-populist alternative.

Fine.

Let's imagine one.

What would an actual left-populist movement look like?

Probably something much closer to:

class politics + economic nationalism + cheap energy + housing + wages + labor power + opposition to concentrated economic power.

And what would happen if you actually built that movement?

You would have to throw a tremendous amount of contemporary activist-left ideology into the wood chipper.

Because the working-class constituency you supposedly want to represent may have completely different preferences on:

• immigration
• energy
• crime
• national identity
• gender politics
• policing
• foreign policy
• industrial policy
• cultural institutions

At some point you have to choose.

Do you want the existing activist left to remain ideologically intact?

Or do you want to build a mass working-class coalition?

Because those aren't necessarily the same project.

And that's the part Hallam doesn't seem to understand.

You Can't Build Populism by Exporting an Elite Subculture

This is the fundamental contradiction.

He identifies his own movement as:

• young
• middle class
• highly ideological
• disproportionately educated
• culturally homogeneous

Then he proposes taking that movement's culture into the wider population.

That's backwards.

A populist movement doesn't begin by asking:

"How can we teach ordinary people to become more like us?"

It begins by asking:

"What do ordinary people actually want?"

And sometimes the answer is going to be extremely inconvenient for the people organizing the movement.

Maybe the truck driver doesn't want his fuel bill doubled.

Maybe the factory worker doesn't want his factory moved overseas.

Maybe the young couple doesn't want to spend 40% of their income on rent.

Maybe the working-class voter doesn't consider his national identity a pathology.

Maybe the guy working 50 hours a week doesn't give a shit about the activist's preferred terminology.

And maybe, just maybe, that's why they aren't joining your movement.

The Author's Problem Is Precisely What He Claims to Diagnose

Hallam says the populist right is going to fail because its culture is dysfunctional.

But the essay spends remarkably little time asking why millions of people find the populist right politically attractive.

Instead, it analyzes the personalities and interpersonal habits of the people he dislikes.

That's not an explanation of populism.

It's an explanation of why Roger Hallam doesn't like Roger Hallam's political opponents.

The man wants to create a left-populist movement while apparently retaining the political instincts of the educated activist class.

That's like announcing:

"I am going to start a working-class restaurant. The menu will consist exclusively of food that middle-class vegans already enjoy."

Then wondering why the steelworkers aren't showing up.

The funniest thing about the entire article is that Hallam may actually have identified a real weakness in his own movement.

He just thinks it is culture.

It might be the constituency.

Two events in the past week have illustrated the growing lack of international confidence in the stability of the US financial and political system.

Last Wednesday the Dutch National Bank (DNB) revealed that between March and August it had moved part of its gold holdings from New York and Ottawa to London because of “increasing geopolitical unrest.”

This was followed by an announcement from the manager of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund that it was proposing an overhaul of its government bond holdings which could result in a cut to its stock of US Treasury bonds by as much as $80 billion as it looked to other kinds of debt which could bring a greater return.

The Dutch central bank said it had moved around 86 tonnes of its total gold holdings of 313 tonnes in the US and Canada and that it was “strengthening its crisis preparedness.”

The language used in the DNB statement was carefully guarded but it did not take too much reading between the lines to pick up the essential meaning. It said that gold held with the Bank of England was regarded as “the world’s most easily tradable gold and will therefore be the most readily available for DNB in a crisis situation. The gold reserves in New York and Ottawa cannot be utilised as quickly in such a situation.”

In its report on the move the Financial Times (FT) said it followed calls in Europe for repatriation of gold from the US amid warnings that “an unreliable American government under President Donald Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions.”

Last year, the Taxpayers Association of Europe sent letters to the finance ministers and central banks of Germany and Italy urging them to reconsider their gold holdings in New York. The president of the association, Michael Jäger, said “we are very concerned about Trump tampering with the Federal Reserve Bank’s independence.”

...

Ever since President Nixon removed the gold backing from the US dollar in August 1971 and the international monetary system was based on the dollar as a fiat currency—no longer backed by gold as the ultimate embodiment of value but by confidence in the US financial system—bourgeois economists and some who considered themselves to be Marxists have maintained that Marx’s analysis of the pivotal role of gold had been refuted.

But Marx’s analysis is being confirmed by what might be considered unlikely sources.

In an article in the FT earlier this month under the headline “Gold’s run isn’t done yet,” Bhanu Baweja, chief strategist at UBS Investment Bank, pointed to the rise in the price of gold, particularly after the decision of the US and the European powers to seize the financial assets of the Russian central bank held in Western banks at the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022.

As a result of this action, he wrote: “Reserve and asset managers globally were left confronting a simple question: if $630bn held in Treasuries, Bunds, gilts and other bonds could become inaccessible overnight, what constituted money? Their answer was gold.”

He also noted that a “more structural driver of gold has been the gradual erosion of confidence in US public finances”—a reference to the mounting national US debt now $40 trillion with no plan in sight to halt what is universally acknowledged as its “unsustainable” rise.

The enhanced role of gold and the erosion of confidence in US financial assets are expressed in facts and figures.

In June, the European Central Bank reported on a significant jump in the portion of gold in the reserves held by central banks.

Virtually everything Sahra Wagenknecht and her BSW contingent loudly demand and do aligns with the Kremlin's interests. With their success in Saxony-Anhalt, the party can take this shameless Putinism to the extreme.

Vladimir Putin’s goals regarding Germany could arguably be summarized as follows: The Federal Republic should abandon Ukraine and resume purchasing large quantities of Russian gas. It should work towards the decline of NATO and the EU. And it would be entirely to the Russian leader’s liking if Germans were to turn their backs on liberal democracy. The path would be clear for Putin’s imperialism: Ukraine would likely face ruin, Moscow could look forward to a full war chest, and Berlin would once again be dependent on the aggressor in the East. And the West as a powerful counterweight? Fragmented, diminished, and weakened.

Kremlin is dancing with joy

The election in Saxony-Anhalt is likely to spark celebrations in the Kremlin. Just under 44 percent for the AfD, 5.3 percent for Wagenknecht’s BSW. An absolute majority in parliament for a pro-Moscow alliance - should it come to pass, in whatever form that might take. Putin’s destructive agenda cannot be carried out with democrats who possess even a shred of decency. That is why Russia relies on destabilization. The aim is to bring democracy - along with its representatives and institutions - into disrepute and to stoke fear through disinformation and hybrid attacks.

And with the support of shameless accomplices in Germany who trumpet Kremlin propaganda and make it impossible to form serious, sensible majorities. The AfD is part of this. But so is Sahra Wagenknecht.

What Wagenknecht and her loyal BSW contingent loudly demand and do—and what she markets to anxious people as a policy of peace - invariably aligns with the interests of the Kremlin. The BSW rejects sanctions against Moscow, as well as the provision of weapons for Ukraine’s defensive struggle; instead, it advocates for the flow of Russian gas. Wagenknecht would like to see NATO replaced by a new alliance - one that includes Russia.

When the government countered the attack in Leipzig with a pointed message directed at Moscow, Wagenknecht feigned outrage. Yet, the BSW in Saxony-Anhalt disparaged the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a money-hungry con artist. When members of the BSW engaged in substantive policymaking - as they did in Thuringia - they were treated like lepers. In Saxony-Anhalt, Wagenknecht’s allies aim, first and foremost, to harm Ukraine. With the help of the AfD, they intend to use a formal motion to call on the state government to push for a halt to German military aid within the Bundesrat. In other words: Kyiv is expected to simply surrender.

One can readily speculate about what drives Wagenknecht and her supporters. One thing is certain: the narrative that a more moderate form of populism would defeat the AfD has been resoundingly disproven. Instead, the BSW acts as a catalyst for the toxic climate in which the AfD thrives.

Fall-from-grace scenario

And now? Before the election, the BSW flirted with the idea of ​​abstaining in the third round of the vote for minister-president - thereby indirectly making the AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund the head of government.

Given the arithmetic realities, this "original sin" scenario currently appears to be off the table. Yet the mere willingness to pave the way for the first far-right state government since World War II was an act that normalized anti-democratic forces. The same applies to the plan to establish a cross-party government - likewise involving the AfD.

There is one person likely to be particularly pleased about all this: Vladimir Putin.

On September 3, at its regular press briefing in Brussels, European Commission spokesperson for Interior and Migration Markus Lammert reiterated that Morocco remains an “important strategic partner” for the EU on migration. He said the focus of cooperation is on tackling people-smuggling networks and irregular migration, an area where Brussels says coordination with Rabat has become significantly closer in recent years.

Notably, Lammert did not frame Morocco as the place where everything begins. He stressed that the Commission is stepping up migration cooperation not only with Rabat, but with partners along the entire route. That framing also makes sense geographically: many journeys begin farther south, pass through different parts of North Africa, and only then reach Morocco, the final stretch before Spain, rather than the starting point of every route.

During the same briefing, the Commission also pointed to close coordination between Spain and Morocco in managing migration, including arrangements to return people who have no right to remain. And when asked whether Brussels was considering a rethink of its relationship with Rabat, the answer was not to scale back cooperation. Instead, the EU said it was continuing to strengthen the relationship on a more comprehensive basis, including in ways that directly serve the EU’s own migration interests.

Hi all,

I would like to actually understand what the fuck is going on with Trump's tariff shenanigans. Why is this faction of the American ruling class ditching free trade extremism? Does this benefit them in some way and how? Does it benefit the US as a whole in some way and how? Are there any prominent economic thinkers behind this, and who are they? Is this just insane flailing by a brain-damaged freak and his yesmen or do they sort of know what they're doing? How do tariffs end up affecting economies over the short term and long term? And finally isn't it weird that much of the left has sort of dropped the anti-globalization line that we used to have, why is that and how did it happen?

I'm looking for good quality material addressing any of these questions; preferably magazine and journal articles and books, but good indie/substack stuff is fine, and I'd also check out good podcast episodes or YouTube videos.

Thanks so much stupidpol!

I've been thinking about this one: **Was there a time before the rise of the modern Protestant work ethic and industrial capitalism when people were this intensely conscious of how they were spending their time?**

I’m wondering how much of our lingering moral anxiety about “wasting time” is actually a historical byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Obviously, people have always had schedules, obligations, deadlines, and periods of idleness—but did people historically feel the same kind of guilt over time that we seem to experience today, where leisure can almost feel illegitimate unless it's somehow productive, improving us, or serving some instrumental purpose?

That's what makes me wonder how much contemporary capitalism has reinforced this mentality across the broader population. At what point did *not doing anything useful* become something that could be morally interpreted as wasting a resource?

In other words, **how historically unusual is our obsession with making every hour “count”?** And how much of the feeling that we're somehow wasting our lives whenever we're not working, learning, exercising, producing, or otherwise engaging in some instrumental activity can actually be traced back to the Industrial Revolution and the economic culture that developed around it?

I'm not necessarily arguing that capitalism invented time-consciousness or that preindustrial people just lounged around all day. I'm more curious about when *time itself* became so heavily moralized.

what exactly does any of this mean?