ragnarmueller

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And even in a time of profound economic dislocation, American politics has become less about which party is good for your wallet and more about whether the cultural changes of the past 50 years delight or dismay you.

Opinion | Three Theories That Explain This Strange Moment - The New York Times

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The cultural backlash theory comes from the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart. Inglehart, who died last year, is famous for tracking the post-materialist turn in global politics. Starting around the 1970s, generations raised in relative affluence began to care less about traditional economic issues and more about questions of personal autonomy and social values. The core fights of politics turned away from the distribution of money to the preservation of the environment and women’s bodily autonomy and marriage equality. These changes were generational, and they’ve moved steadily from the margins of politics to the center. That’s led to a backlash among those opposed to, or simply disoriented by, the speed at which social mores are shifting, and the rise, in countries all over the world, of a post-materialist right. That’s led to a slew of right-wing parties that care more about culture and identity than tax cuts and deregulation. “You can call them the radical right, that’s a very common way of labeling them,” Norris told me in a podcast conversation, “but they’re not always right-wing in economics. Sometimes they’re fairly positive toward public spending — for example, in Scandinavian countries. What distinguishes them is that they really want to restore and push back against social liberalism, or as we call it in the contemporary parlance in the media, the ‘woke’ agenda.”

Opinion | Three Theories That Explain This Strange Moment - The New York Times

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I hope history becomes a tool to free people rather than bind them. A tool to forge new concords rather than perpetuate old conflicts. After all, the point of learning history is not to remember the past, but to be liberated from it.

#history #children #education #parents and parenting #world news

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When politicians ignore this lesson, and the pessimists start to dominate the public discourse, demagogues like Le Pen and Trump find it that much easier to win power. To keep them in check, political leaders need to recover a realistic optimism—and offer voters of every ethnic and religious group a vision of the future that they would actually be excited to live in.

#ideas

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Critics constantly talk about a “democratic deficit” within the EU but in reality almost the opposite is true. The system is so complicated and slow-moving precisely because it requires the consent of 26 democratically elected governments plus Hungary, as well as a democratically elected European parliament and sometimes also sub-national states and regions. The EU is a permanent negotiation. The wonder is not that it moves slowly but that it moves at all.

In Germany’s election, the fate of the EU is at stake | Timothy Garton Ash | The Guardian

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Das Gericht argumentiert mit dem den Artikel 20a des Grundgesetzes. Darin heißt es: "'Der Staat schützt auch in Verantwortung für die künftigen Generationen die natürlichen Lebensgrundlagen und die Tiere im Rahmen der verfassungsmäßigen Ordnung durch die Gesetzgebung und nach Maßgabe von Gesetz und Recht durch die vollziehende Gewalt und die Rechtsprechung." Hierauf bezieht sich das Gericht. Es dürfe nicht einer Generation zugestanden werden, "unter vergleichsweise milder Reduktionslast große Teile des CO2-Budgets zu verbrauchen, wenn damit zugleich den nachfolgenden Generationen eine radikale Reduktionslast überlassen und deren Leben umfassenden Freiheitseinbußen ausgesetzt würde."

Bundesverfassungsgericht: Deutsches Klimaschutzgesetz ist in Teilen verfassungswidrig | ZEIT ONLINE

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Lernen ist das Erschließen von Sinn.

Sieben Lernmythen im Check: Nein, Sie sind kein visueller Lerntyp - DER SPIEGEL

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What distinguishes the national populists is that they never apologize for anything their nation has ever done in its history. To act like a villain while retaining the moral right to feel like a victim is the nationalistic populist’s signature conceit.

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Looking at the online roster of British ministerial roles, all I find is a mention of “future relations with the EU” under Gove (who, in practice, seems to be the minister for everything), while the foreign secretary has “Europe” listed among his responsibilities. Under him, there is a junior minister “for European Neighbourhood and Americas”. If the government goes on like this, then its special relationship with the EU will be ripe for the biting quip I once heard former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt make about Britain’s vaunted special relationship with the US: “It’s so special that only one side knows it exists.”

The UK and EU are heading for bad-tempered rivalry, unless we can avert it – European Council on Foreign Relations

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Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

The American Abyss - The New York Times

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One of the reasons there cannot be a postmortem on Trumpism is that Trumpism is postmortem. Its core appeal is necromantic. It promised to make a buried world rise again: coal mines would reopen in West Virginia, lost car plants would return to Detroit. Good, secure, unionized muscle jobs would come back. The unquestionable privilege of being white and male and native would be restored. Trump did not manage to do any of this, of course. But, in a sense, that very failure keeps the promise pure, unadulterated by the complexities of reality. We have seen in Trump’s triumph in Ohio and very strong performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that it still has great purchase on the imagination of millions.

Democracy’s Afterlife | by Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

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Before the 2008 global financial crisis, populist governments went along with neoliberalism. But afterwards they began to take a new approach. Hungary led the way, after Viktor Orbán’s decisive 2010 election victory.

‘Work, family, fatherland’: populist social policies in central and eastern Europe – Mitchell Orenstein and Bojan Bugaric

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Künstliche Intelligenz ist nicht einfach eine weitere Technologie. KI ist so etwas wie die nächste Stufe der Technologie selbst.

USA gegen China: Pedro Domingos zur Künstlichen Intelligenz

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„Europa ist erneut zum Laboratorium für die Suche nach einer staatlichen Ordnung geworden. Einst war in Europa der Nationalstaat erschaffen worden, nun geht es um eine erneute weltgeschichtliche Innovation: Nationalstaaten staatenübergreifend verbinden. Aber nicht imperial, sondern kooperativ und demokratisch legitimiert. Es wäre eine Rückkehr Europas zur globalen Bedeutung – aber in einer staatlichen Gestalt, die in der Geschichte ohne Vorbild ist.“

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Man fragt sich, was Hobby-Columbus Salvini machen wird, wenn er "entdeckt", dass das ganze Produkt des italienischen Unternehmens mithilfe unitalienischer Lebensmittel zusammengerührt wird. Nutella ist, wie viele andere Süßwaren auch, das Ergebnis von Invasion und open-border. Weder das Palmöl noch die Schokolade, auch der Zucker stammen nicht aus Italien. Jemand muss Salvini auch vorsichtig beibringen, dass Espresso nicht aus Kaffeefrüchten vom ligurischen Lavazzastrauch besteht, sondern ein original afrikanisches Produkt ist.

Nationalismus: Lutscht doch Tannenharz! | ZEIT ONLINE

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The 2019 European Parliament elections seem to underline the gradual shift from traditional politics between mainstream left and right parties that defined the post-war period to the politics of urban cosmopolitanism, represented by Green or Liberal parties opposed by more peripherally concentrated nativist traditionalism carried by the radical right.

A not so silent revolution: The new power of old divides in European politics | EUROPP

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Erst kamen die Eltern auf Facebook, dann die Rechtspopulisten in die Parlamente.

Die Wiederkehr des Populismus: Im Namen des Volkes