Mark Byron

Playing by the (Golden) Rules

Enlightenment liberalism is a hard sell these days. We see right-populists gumming up the works in Italy (where a nativist Lega party is leading in the polls), Germany (where their AfD nativist force "grand coalitions" of establishment parties to keep them at bay) and the UK (where Brexit animates a more populist Johnson government to the dismay of the Tory elites) as well as the US.

Thus, we have have a lot of hand-wringing in elite circles. This Politico EU piece wonders if they've hit peak populism and this piece on the Politico mothership worries that they haven't... because the peasants are too dense to appreciate it-

As much as President Donald Trump’s liberal critics might want to lay America’s ills at his door, [psychologist Shaun] Rosenberg says the president is not the cause of democracy’s fall—even if Trump’s successful anti-immigrant populist campaign may have been a symptom of democracy’s decline.

We’re to blame, said Rosenberg. As in “we the people.”

Democracy is hard work. And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.

His prediction? “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”

Secular small-l liberal thought doesn't always sell well, especially if people feel threaten by their anti-conservative-religion and citizen-of-the-world views. If your small-l liberal elites can't explain how their world-view works better for the county than a nativist populist, then there might be a problem with their world-view rather than with the mind of the median voter. However, that requires humility (that you might actually be wrong) and respect for your fellow man, something that runs counter to human nature.

How does open borders and free trade help Joe Sixpack? How does normalizing sexual minorities make life better for folks whose religion or culture sees being heterosexual and cisgendered as optimal versus the alternatives? Those are items that can be hard sells if you're working against racism (immigration) blue-collar self-interest (immigration and free trade) and traditional culture both secular and religous (sexual minorities and immigration).

The Golden Rule seems to the cornerstone of liberalism when done well, but when forgiveness for people who disagree with you is lacking, you get conservatives "deplatformed" by militant leftists and liberals being asked to leave America if they don't buy into a Trumpian world-view. Without forgiveness and respect for others, you'll see autocratic tendencies across the political spectrum.

Small-l liberal democracy will give rights to minorities on Golden Rule grounds, since an unshackled democracy allows 51% to rape and pillage the other 49%. Loving God and loving one's neighbor as oneself were Jesus' two prime directives; it's hard to do the latter without the former, but liberal democracies try to institutionalize the Golden Rule.

The cultural left will want the Golden Rule applied to immigrants and sexual minorities, but neglect to give grace to poor natives and folks with a more traditional sexual morality. Christian traditionalists will often forget to be charitable to immigrants and minorities both ethnic and sexual, forgetting that Imago Dei applies to the targets of Trumpian wrath.

Democracy, to borrow from Mencken, is the idea that the people should get what they want ... good and hard. Even if it isn't good for them. In a democracy, your candidate will occasionally (and sometimes frequently) be beaten by the "bad guy", but if your guy always wins, you're living in a one-party state that you agree with. Sometimes the bad guys win, and your job is to persuade part of the majority to support your guys.

The alternative is either an autocratic state that enforces your world-view, or a bounded democracy where unacceptable candidates aren't allowed. Iran has democratic features, but only within the bounds set by a group of Shia clergy. Germany has a lot more democratic features than Iran, but parties that look too Nazi are persona non grata.

Germany came to mind via this piece, where a city councilman from a Naziesque party got elected mayor by his peers, much to the chagrin of everyone and his uncle.

Stefan Jagsch of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) was elected unanimously by seven councillors in Waldsiedlung, near Frankfurt am Main.

Mr Jagsch won because no rival stood against him. The small town has about 2,650 residents.

The NPD has survived efforts to ban it, but is seen as "anti-constitutional".

Note that the NPD is a very small party and not the larger nativist AfD; the AfD seems to have absorbed much of the NPD vote on the national level, but Mr. Jagsch seems to have been an exception to the rule.

The NPD does have some troubling tendencies, like wanting to regain the ethnically-German areas in other countries and a rejection of the small-l liberal order. However, the German electoral authorities have opted not to declare it illegal, fearing that deplatforming it will give it more attention than it deserves.

One of liberalism's weak spots is that the Golden Rule mentality will give grace to people who would not give it back in return were they in power, be they white-nationalists or Islamists. Liberalism is playing by the rules in a knife-fight, but playing by the rules is in their DNA. 

You're better off beating such folks at the ballot box rather than banning them, for that merely gives then street cred.

 

Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of Political War

One dog slipped into the British White House today; new PM Johnson got himself a cute pound Jack Russel puppy named Dilyn.

Meanwhile, his new owner seems to have dumped one of Dilyn's calling cards into the middle of the House of Commons, looking to possibly hold a new election on October 17th. The Tories has the squeakiest of majorities (one seat with the help of the small-c conservative Northern Irish DUP)  but has the party's left flank looking to buck the party line and pass a resolution pushing back the Brexit deadline past October 31st. 

That faction forced a move of the leave-date from mid-April to the current Halloween exit date back before the initial exit date hit, but wasn't show the door at the time. The extension didn't help.

What is being posited is to see the Conservatives kick out folks who defect and vote with the opposition tomorrow and call a new election. The Tories would need either a two-thirds majority to call a new election or a vote of no confidence that would trigger an election in order to do the latter. Both options would require Labour support, which they may or may not give.

There's an anti-no-deal majority in Parliament right now. It can't figure out what it does want but it knows it doesn't want a cold-turkey Brexit. 

However, that majority might not survive a new election. The opposition party usually doesn't want to be seen saying, "no, we're good being in the minority. Let's hold off on a new election for a bit" but Labour would likely get its head handed to it at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.

The Conservatives are doing well in the polls as of late as the Remain vote gets split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. There is also a Brexit Party wild-card that could draw votes away from the Tories as well, but if the new election were held as a de-facto referendum on Brexit, Johnson could get more BP voters than they currently have in the polls without losing much support to the Liberal Democrats.

We may see an interesting political hurricane hit London in a day or two. Interesting times for this old Poli-Sci major.

Boris Badarsenov

I've been following British politics a bit more than is healthy as of late. The poli-sci guy likes the alt-universe effect of a near-American country using a different system. The international econ guy likes the history-in-the-making part of Brexit. Lastly, the cast of players is a bit more likable than at home, where the market for Sweet Meteor of Death stickers grows by the day.

British politics is somewhat on hold for an August break, digesting the changeover from the technocratic Theresa May to the mildly bombastic Boris Johnson. He'd be a notch too socially liberal (pro-SSM, live-in-girlfriend) to survive a GOP primary but there's not much of a Religious Right vote in the UK, letting him with the Conservative Party runoff primary (MPs whittled it down to two choices for the party members to vote on) 2-1 over his more centrist rival.  Trump considers him a brother-in-arms and the Rock considered him a cousin until the PC police educated him.

Halloween is the witching day for Brexit, after the May government kicked the can forward after failing to get her proposed deal through Parliament by the original April deadline. New PM Johnson has his Howie Mandel on, wanting to leave the EU at the end of October, deal or no deal. Johnson was one of the highest-profile Tories to support the 2016 Brexit vote, while May was pro-Remain in '16, somewhat grudgingly following the voters wishes.

The fun (if you're a Yank without any skin in the game) part is to watch the Mother of Parliaments play out in full dysfunction mode. There isn't a majority for a cold-turkey "no deal" Brexit, there wasn't a majority for the May-EU deal that left the UK in a open-ended transition period that could only be ended with the EU's agreeing to a long-term deal, and there wasn't a majority to scrap Brexit all-together.  They can't agree to move it or milk it.

The Johnson government has the barest of majorities, even with the help of the Northern Irish small-c conservative DUP. They had two seats to spare when Johnson made the trip to have the queen name him PM, which got whittled down to one after a by-election in Wales replaced an ethically-challenged Tory with a resurgent screw-Brexit Liberal Democrat.

That means it would only take one renegade Tory to sink the government. That would create the prospect of an early election, for a coherent coalition of everyone but pro-Johnson Conservatives and the DUP agreeing on a replacement prime minister is hard to see, as this ConservativeHome (think Red State UK without the Trump-flavoring) article points out. 

If an election did occur, it would be a three or four way free-for-all, with the British left split between the hard-left Labour party (Jeremy Corbyn plays like a Bernie Sanders with a tin ear towards Jew-bashing in the party) and the more moderate but very anti-Brexit LibDems and the right split between the Conservatives and the Tea Party-ish Brexit Party, a remix of an earlier UK Independence Party shorn of (most) of the white-nationalist types; it came in first in the May EU elections.

Johnson's fairly strong pro-Brexit stance should placate some of the Tory voters who jumped ship in May for a fairly free protest vote who will come home rather than let a Corbyn government come to pass; the polling number seem to indicate that Johnson's win has shaved the Brexit Party's vote down from ~20% to mid-teens. The Brexit Party may also draw from blue-collar Labour voters who don't like having to compete with workers coming to the UK from poorer sections of the EU (e.g. there's a big Polish contingent in the UK) and are pro-Brexit, so it isn't just renegade Tories that give Fox News fave Nigel Farage their vote.

International Econ stuff. Comparative poli-sci stuff. Yes, I am a nerd. Guilty as charged.

 

Brexit, Stage Right

Some fireworks from across the pond today, and they aren't left over from their July 4th stash like the ones going off in our neighborhood this weekend. The UK and EU are on the home stretch of figuring out their divorce settlement for "Brexit", and the current plan on the table has the UK piggy-backing on a lot of EU trade rules as a default.

Being stuck with a lot of overbearing EU rules written by Eurocrats in Brussels is one of the pet peeves of Leavers, so this package isn't going over well. The Brexit secretary resigned over the weekend and the foreign secretary, former London mayor Boris Johnson, handed in his resignation today.  Johnson is the informal captain of Team Leave and a favorite in the small-c conservative wing of the Tories.

The current Conservative government of Theresa May has a small working majority, needing the Northern Irish conservative DUP to patch together a majority. It wouldn't take too many rebel Leavers voting against this package to make her need votes from the opposition to pass the Brexit passage.

The opposition is generally for staying in the EU, but Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is rather skeptical of the EU while Labour as a whole was in the Remain camp in the referendum vote. That being said, it would seem that a large part of the bounce Labour got in the last election was due to winning back a large chunk of the UK Independence Party vote after UKIP's core concept was agreed to in the referendum.

UKIP seems to have had a lot of former Labor voters who were seeing immigrants from the poorer parts of the EU competing with them for jobs, along with Conservative-leaning voters who liked their message. There might be quite a few Labour MPs who might opt to take that tack rather than preferring the EU status quo.

Thus, Prime Minister May might consider a bipartisan package on Brexit, making a deal with Leave-leaning Labourites to make up for the uber-Leavers in the Tory caucus. However, parliamentary government rarely works that way, as party discipline usually carries the day and the threat of "three-line whips" (vote the party line or die) keeps defections to a minimum. 

A counter to that is the fact that May can't afford many MPs walking out of the Conservative Party over the issue. They could win the vote with opposition support, but she'd quickly face a vote of no confidence if the Leave Party MPs wanted a new election. 

May may also face a leadership challenge. PMs aren't assured a full term; Conservatives have replaced two sitting PMs mid-term in the last quarter century, including May's predecessor, David Cameron. She may well be a third. If the uber-Leavers are in a feisty mood, they could force a vote on her leadership.

Very interesting politics. To throw fuel on to the political fire, one of the EU's presidents, Donald Tusk, declared good bye and good riddance to the uber-Leavers.

“You know politicians come and go,” Tusk said on Twitter. “But the problems they have created for their people remain and the mess caused by Brexit is the biggest problem in the history of EU-U.K. relations, and it is still very far from being solved with or without Mr. Davis. And unfortunately the idea of Brexit hasn’t left together with Mr. Davis. ”

I guess Tusk didn't get the memo on letting your enemy alone when he's in the process of shooting himself in the foot. Or as a proper British lady might say, "Tusk, tusk."

 

The Trouble With Trimbles

We've had a very interesting week news-wise, but I'm more interested in the results of the British election than the Comey the Clown show on the Hill.

The ruling Conservatives called an early election, thinking that the disarray that both the anti-EU UK Independence Party and the Labour Party were under would allow them to gain seats. The Tories gained votes, but Labour gained even more, as the disintegration of UKIP saw a lot of their blue-collar voters go to Labour.  In addition, the hard-left Labour leader Corbyn seems to have drained votes from left-wing third parties as well as UKIP; rather than scarring off center-left folks who warned to Tony Blair and his successors, it seems to have helped Labour somewhat.

When the dust settled Friday morning, the Tories had lost their majority, landing then 317 seats, nine short of a majority. That doesn't mean that PM May is out of a job; the main conservative/Protestant party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party, has 10 seats (the Northern Irish polity runs on sectarian lines independent of the rest of the UK) just enough to put the Tories over the top.

There is a rough draft of a plan to have the DUP support the Conservatives but not be formally part of a government; "confidence and supply" is the parliamentary lingo for that set-up, where they'll sign off on budgets and votes of confidence to keep the current government in place. Canada limped through the better part of a decade with that kind of setup, with both the Conservatives and Liberals taking a turn in having the most seats, but needing the consent of one of the opposition parties to keep going.

The interesting kicker with the DUP is that they would be right at home with the Gospel Coalition crowd stateside. They were founded by a rather conservative Presbyterian minister, Ian Paisley, who served as a unionist counterweight to the ethnically Catholic IRA during the Troubles. With the Republic of Ireland being run by a gay half-Indian prime minister, the fears of being ruled by a bunch of papists is a bit antiquated, but the DUP definitely would prefer being part of the UK.

The modern DUP hasn't strayed too far from those roots, having views on abortion, same-sex marriage and creation/evolution that would make them seem as much northern Alabama as Northern Ireland. Of course, that rubs secular folks the wrong way, including the lesbian Tory leader in Scotland, who chafes at the idea that NI is exempt from the recent allowing of same-sex marriage in Britain. NI also bans most abortions except in emergencies due to that old-school streak in the province.

Thus, the secular left and center are aghast at them having a veto on government. It also throws a bit of a monkey-wrench into internal NI politics, as the British government tries to play a honest-broker role between the DUP and Sinn Fein, the IRA party. With the DUP backing the government, it makes that neutral facade harder to maintain; however, Sinn Fein will rarely have anything nice to say about London in the best of times.

One commentator I read this weekend questioned having the DUP in government at all, as their presence would throw off that neutrality of the Good Friday accord that ended the Troubles. If they can't be a part of supporting a government, then why let them have seats? That reduces their present to something akin to DC or Puerto Rico, who get a single delegate that can only vote in House committees. The Puertorriqueños are voting on statehood today, by the way; a pro-statehood vote might remedy that status if Congress concurs. 

It's been interesting to see the gnashing of secular teeth over the DUP kingmaker role.

P.S.- My title was based on the name of David Trimble, a former premier of NI, but he was from the more-centrist Protestant UUP rather than the DUP. That blows a hole in the analogy, but I can't resist a good pun.

 

 

 

Unholy Toledo

It's often a head-scratcher when you see names of leaders who are atypical for their country. The classic case for me was the former Peruvian leader Alberto Fujimori; if he came to the US, he'd be considered Hispanic since he's a native-born Spanish speaker but is of Japanese descent.

Well, welcome to another classic Hispanic name,Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. His dad's of Polish descent, but he was born in Peru and is now the president.

I found out about him via this BBC piece noting how one of his predicessors, Alejandro Toledo, is on the lam from corruption charges back home, and got declared persona non grata by Israel. To top it all off, we have a double Jewish connection; Kucynski's dad was Jewish and so is Toledo's wife.

Just your typical leadership class in South America. 

Headlee Does the Samba

Brazil seems to be taking a page out of teen years, as they've passed a constitutional amendment to cap government spending at current levels.

The project, known in Brazil as PEC 55, freezes expenditure in the executive, judiciary and legislative branches of power, allowing them to grow only by the rate of inflation in the previous year.

Folks on the left, who want the size of government to grow, don't like it; it doesn't help matters that they impeached a leftist president earlier in the year, so the left is in an ornery mood to begin with.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets during the Senate session to protest against the austerity plan.

After the vote, many demonstrations descended into violence.

In Brasilia, masked protesters set fire to a bus and marched on the local offices of Globo TV, which they say is biased towards [new president] Mr Temer's government. But the marchers were blocked by riot police.

The teen years part flows from 1978, when Michigan, following the anti-tax mood that most famously gave us California's Proposition 13, passed the Headlee Amendment, which stated that "... the state’s total revenue cannot exceed 9.49 percent of personal income in Michigan." If memory serves, that figure was the current figure in 1978. It also put in rules limiting what would come to be known as unfunded mandates in the early 90s and on mandating local votes on local tax increases.

Michigan has function reasonably well with that in place and has stayed on the books for almost four decades. Liberals have grumbled about it, especially in the early going, but it has settled in to the political rules of the game.

A majority of the voters can rewrite the constitution in Michigan, but Brazil's needs a 60% majority of both houses. That might be hard for the left to undo, but if a crisis that needs a bigger government goes down, such a supermajority could be conjured up to undo it. In the US, 60% (60 votes to be technical, but that's 60% if everyone shows) is the threshold needed to break a filibuster in the Senate, so that's a manageable hurdle to undo this in the future.

It's a bit of a hardball trick for the right, but hard-wiring policy into the constitution is a common trick in many state constitutions; Michigan, for example, makes public worker's pensions untouchable, something that came into play with the Detroit bankruptcy.

Lame Duck a l'Orange

One interesting aspect of American politics is the 2.5 month period between a presidential election and the swearing in of the new president. The swearing-at the incoming president happens right away, but we have an awkward period where the incoming president has no direct power and the outgoing president has lessened power, left to make trips abroad and contemplate any last-minute pardons or administrative decisions that could advance his side's cause or his legacy.

In contrast, the transition period in parliamentary systems takes hours rather than months. The day after a British election, the old PM has his stuff hauled out of 10 Downing, he goes to the Queen to tender his resignation, the new PM goes to the castle to be formally asked by the Queen to take over, and the new PM's stuff gets hauled into 10 Downing. There is no lame-duck period to speak of.

President Obama has been rather gracious, publicly hoping for the best from the new administration and assuring the rest of the world that Trump isn't quite the Devil incarnate. His professorial style can come off as condescending if you're on the wrong end of an issue, but that aloofness seems to help take some of the steam out of the frustration of the left. 

Talkin' 'Bout Regeneration

The rise of the Iceland Pirate Party was a bit exaggerated. Instead of challenging for the top spot at about 20%, they came in third with 14.5%. The Independence Party, part of the current right-of-center coalition, got 29%, while the Panama Papers-damaged PM's Progressive Party was trimmed down to 11.5%.

There isn't a clear working coalition as of yet. The left has 27, the right has 29 and a new center-right Regeneration party has 7 seats. Regeneration seems to hold the balance of power; they split off from the IP over joining the EU, for the IP is opposed and Regeneration is for joining.

Whether that EU split is enough to get them to join a center-left coalition remains to be seen, but it does appear that the Pirates might well be kept away from the helm; the Left-Greens had a bigger vote share than the Pirates, although they both got 10 seats, so the Lefties would be the default choice to draw a PM from, assuming Regeneration goes left rather than right.

Crowning a Pirate Queen

The German Pirate Party had been doing fairly well earlier in the decade, breaking the 5% threshold for getting into state legislatures, but have been fading a bit in the last year, as immigration issues move to the fore and intellectual property rights became much less of a pressing issue.

However, Iceland is seeing their Pirate Party making the big time. They got 5% of the vote in their last election, but the forced resignation of a right-of-center prime minister for offshore financial holdings prompted a new election on this Saturday. The Pirates are at 20% or so in the polls, neck-and-neck with the right-of-center Independence Party for first place; Iceland has proportional representation, so the vote is somewhat spread out and coalition governments are the norm.

The Pirate Parties primary focus is for the free flow of information shorn of copyright protection; the Pirate Bay file-sharing website is the brainchild of the Swedish PP. Other than that, they are left-libertarian in general, but there's some of the Icelandic Pirates are more libertarian than others.

They've noted a disinterest in being part of a right-of-center coalition involving the current ruling duplex of the Independence and Progressive parties, so some left-of-center coalition seems to be likely. With the Pirates being the largest party outside of that conservative duo, they might have a Pirate PM when the dust settles. 

That begs a little Gilbert and Sullivan, although we'd need to make it a Pirate Queen since Birgitta Jonsdottir is what passes for a leader of the anti-authoritarian party and thus the likely prime minister candidate from the Pirates.

Gary and Youngstown with a French Accent

Imagine if you would NAFTA being scuttled by the New York legislature because the deal wasn't in the Empire State's best interest. If we had the old Articles of Confederation still in effect, where things needed to pass unanimously  that might well have happened.

That's what we've seen this week as the Walloon region of Belgium shot down a Canada-US trade deal. The deal needed the OK of all the EU countries and Belgium's federal system makes ail their regions sign off on a treaty, so a subset of one EU country shot down the deal.

For the deal to pass, Belgium's federal, regional and community bodies (seven in all) must give their approval.

Wallonia, a staunchly socialist region of 3.6 million people, has led objections to the deal, demanding stronger safeguards on labour, environmental and consumer standards.

As it turns out, Wallonia is something of the Rust Belt of Belgium.

During the heyday of the industrial revolution, Wallonia became the second most industrialised area in the world after Britain, thanks to its deposits of coal and iron, and was Belgium's richer half.

Since then, however, the tables have turned. Wallonia's smokestack industries collapsed as Flanders developed a dynamic services economy and the Flemish GDP roared ahead. The Walloons are now the poor relations.

Such areas of the US aren't fans of trade deals. I recall a pro-free-trade Democrat from the Akron get knocked off in a primary at the turn of the millennia because he supported NAFTA; redistricting had dumped Youngstown into his district in 2002 and the depressed one-time steel-town's protectionist streak ran Tom Sawyer (no kidding, that was his name) off.

Even though the folks in Wallonia have no beef with Canada to speak of, they have a beef with globalization. They also likely have a beef with being an economic backwater with nothing much to sell but a bit of gritty rust-belt chic.

Protectionism is likely not going to bring those factory jobs back, whether it be in Belgium or the US. Neither Trump or Clinton is likely to Make Youngstown Great Again, for those labor-intensive steel mills are economic and environmental dinosaurs, the latter will make them stay dead if Clinton wins and the former will do the trick in a more autarkic Trump reign.

People often want to go back to the good-old-days. However, time goes but one direction, for life has no rewind button. Striving to go back to the 50s or so, to an era where blue-collar labor was well-paid, would require taking the rest of the world back to the 1950s as well, destroying most of Europe and Japan's infrastructure and putting Maoists and their backward economics and goonishness in charge of China. The US was nearly the only game in town back then, so American industry thrived.

Not so much today. The rest of the world has caught up and the modern economy left Wallonia in its dust.

Throwing the Bus Under the Bus

The post-coup news in Turkey isn't promising. 

The failed coup is serving as an excuse for a massive round-up of members of the judiciary and army officers, far greater than anything seen in Turkey for years, and is presumably a bid to secure Erdogan’s grip on the Turkish state. So numerous are those detained that a sports stadium is being used to hold some of them, a development that has ominous similarities with mass arrests in South American coups in the last century. Some 140 out of 387 judges in the Court of Appeal have been detained along with 48 out of 156 from the Council of State.

Chile is the one that sprang to mind even before I scrolled down a notch to see the "South American coups" reference; the Pinochet regime turned their main soccer stadium until an ad-hoc prison for leftists the regime wanted out of the way. 

Instapundit noted a Ergodan quote from when he was Istanbul mayor-"‘Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off." In that context, it's merely a vehicle to get you to power, which can be disposed once you're in charge.

The history of Africa comes to mind, where the common pattern in the post-colonial era was "one man, one vote, one time." The initial election after the Europeans were shown the door had the leader of the independence movement elected, then the Big Man stayed in power until he left feet-first. Mugabe in Zimbabwe would be the most aggregious current version; due to Zimbabwe getting a late start at full democracy, Mugabe is still alive and kicking four decades into "majority rule."

Germany also comes to mind, but the African Big Man model seems to be a fair fit for Erdogan than a Reductio ad Hitlerum meme. Either way, the bus of democracy gets ditched once you're in power.

Turkey's Usual Suspect

An interesting subplot in Turkey that I'm starting to catch up on is the story of Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based Turkish Islamic scholar. He's on President Erdogan's manure list and is being blamed for last night's coup attempt.

Here's a worrying bit of rhetoric from the government today on that front-

Fetullah Gulen, who Turkey blames for the failed coup, lives in the US. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said any country that will "stand by" Mr Gulen "won't be a friend of Turkey and will be considered at war with Turkey".

What's now being reported is that Turkey is shutting off access to Incirlik [Air Force Base] - and so stopping the US jets conducting sorties against IS.

Gulen's problem seems to stem from being popular and independent of the government.

Gülen teaches a Hanafi version of Islam, deriving from Sunni Muslim scholar Said Nursî's teachings. Gülen has stated that he believes in science, interfaith dialogue among the People of the Book, and multi-party democracy.^[12] He has initiated such dialogue with the Vatican^[13] and some Jewish organizations

He's also not a believer in using violence to advance Islam, preferring a peaceful jihad against the sins of the world. 

Nursi seems to be an interesting critter who died in 1960. He was Kurdish with backgrounds in both mainstream Sunni and the more mystical Sufi tradition-

He proposed educational reforms to the Ottoman Sultan AbdulHamid aiming to put the traditional Madrasah (seminary) training, Sufism (tasawwuf) and the modern sciences in dialogue with each other

The science-and-faith dialog has echoes of Modern Orthodox Jewish thought (or post-WWI evangelical moves away from fundamentalist anti-intellectualism), while the Sufi-Madrasa interface brings echoes of John Wimber's "radical middle" Baptist-Pentecostal fusion. It sounds like someone who the west "could do business with" as Thatcher said of Gorby.

It also looks like someone who can ruffle feathers. Having a Kurd as a primary influence isn't going to sit well with Turkish centralizers, being devoutly Muslim will ruffle secularists and being independent-minded will both rub against the my-way-or-the-highway tendency of Erdogan. In addition, a popular movement outside of an autocrat's control will make the autocrat nervous, even if the movement isn't much of a direct threat to the regime; witness the Chinese crackdown on independent Christian "house" churches and the Falung Gong movement of hyper-spiritualized Tai Chi.

The last three years have seen Gulenists ousted from government positions, as Erdogan is seemingly worried over a popular Islamic firth column ("parallel state" being the government's phrasing) being a rival for the affections of the more-religious half of the Turkish population. To that end, the Gulenist main paper was shut down by the government in March. Gulen has been in exile since 1999.

If the Turkish government truly wants Gulen's head on a platter as a cost for friendship, then we're in for a very rough road ahead, for he seems to be one of the good guys, or at least nowhere near as big of a bogey-man as the heated rhetoric of the last few years would indicate; at least I've not seen anything now or in the recent past to justify the apparent paranoia.

 

Turkeys are Supposed to Gobble, Not Coo

It looks like the coup attempt in Turkey has failed. The rebels seemed to not have the support of most of the military nor the support of opposition parties, who took to the streets against the coup-plotters along with supporters of President Erdogan. That effect had odd echoes of the ouster of Marcos in the Philippines, where "people power" (and some of the military) refused to let him steal a presidential election. 

The coverage last night was somewhat surreal, as a very confused situation had reporters scrambling. Turkish broadcasters were raided by the rebels, and Erdogan was left to connect via a Facetime app, as a uncaptured station put the camera up to a cell-phone with Erdogan's feed playing; now that's a 21st century moment.

Erdogan has been far from helpful, showing an authoritarian streak, closing some unfriendly media outlets and escalating tensions with their Kurdish minority. He's also been rather problematic geopolitically, backing Hamas in Gaza and working at cross-purposes to the US in Syria, bombing Syrian Kurds who are allied with the US against ISIS and Assad and giving ISIS and al Nuzra fighters freedom of movement.

As I was toggling between Fox News and CNN last night, I was getting a bit exasperated with the Fox team, who seemed to be rooting for the rebels.

The elephant in the room that I haven't mentioned so far is Islam. Erdogan leads a pro-Islamic party, which in an era fearful of Islamic terror creates an instinctive dislike from American conservatives. Conservative Americans who would decry secularism when it encroaches on Christian culture are cheering the secularist heirs of Attaturk on when they try to stifle Islamic culture in Turkey.

For instance, merely wearing a scarf to work or school was a no-no in the pre-Erdogan era in their push to create a secular public square. Turkey's not alone on that front, for France has moved in that direction as well. Fox News has a regular column from Todd Starnes chronicling secularism on the march in schools and government against Christian expression and other non-PC activity, yet they seem to cheer on that march when it is Muslims being stifled.

When you add pro-Hamas and not-enough-against-ISIS moves by Erdogan in the recent past, he becomes persona non grata to the cause of prosecuting the "war on terror." That was hammered home last night.

A more secular government in Ankara would be helpful in the short term in Syria and to a lesser extent vis-a-vis Israel, although there has been a bit of a rapprochement between Israel and Turkey as of late, recovering from an incident a few years back where Israeli troops had to violently board a Turkish ship sending weapons along with humanitarian aid to Gaza. One would assume that a secularized military would be more anti-ISIS, less pro-Hamas and possibly a bit less confrontational about turning Turkish Kurds into "mountain Turks."

However, that would take the most democratic Muslim country (you can't quite say "only democratic..." since Indonesia is working on it, but is not as far removed from military rule) back to the "he's our SOB" era, where a large chunk of the population becomes disenfranchised. If only secularized folks need apply to work or send their kids to school, then it drives folks of faith out of the public square and fuels resentment. Without a peaceful outlet for redressing grievances, they might turn to violence, something all too familiar in that region.

Erdogan will likely need to purge the military, but he might need to couple that with being less confrontational with his peaceful political foes. The latter sadly seems to go against type, since he seems to have an in-your-face MO that is easy to dislike if you are on the other side of the aisle.

If Erdogan is smart, he'll not squander the goodwill generated by the coup and and respect human rights and be more polite to his critics. However, I have a degree in Poli-Sci, not Pollyanna, so it would be well within character to go into "kill them, kill them all" beast mode.

 

Brits Out

That used to be pro-republican graffiti in Northern Ireland. Now, it's the cry of libertarians and blue-collar folks, as the British voted to leave the EU yesterday, 52%-48%; I just found out that the Leave campaign already used that pun months ago. The leaders of all the major parties were for staying, but the voters thought otherwise. Things skewed on class lines, as blue-collar foiks wanted to go while white-collar votes were pro-Remain.

There are reasons for that split. The mobility of labor within the EU meant that folks from less-developed EU areas, such as eastern Europe, could set up shop in Britain, creating added competition for lower-level jobs. Also, the benefit of a common market and visa-free travel inside the EU has more appeal to white-collar folks, who have the money to travel and have skills that are less impacted by the freedom of movement.

On the flip-side, Gibraltar and Northern Ireland voted to Remain, both likely wanting to keep the easy access to their neighbors in the EU. London liked Remain, since the movers and shakers would rather keep a status-quo that worked for them. Rural areas as well as England's Rust Belt thought otherwise.

The markets don't like the news, for we're in for a lot of uncertainty The divorce proceedings have to be done within a two-year window once the UK formally files to leave. We have issues ranging from immigration to tariffs and which of a multitude of EU rules the British want to keep on their own. Even soccer folks are worried, as EU-citizen players in England and other parts of the EU will need to get work permits when previously they were free to come; visa issues aren't much of an issue in US sports, so that's something that should be resolved without too much issue.

Is this bad for Britain? Conservatives were looking to get free of EU regulations and the drain of tax dollars flowing south from the UK. Also, a bias towards "an ever-closer union" means less and less power for London and more power centralized in Brussels. That should stimulate the economy in the long haul.

In the short-term, the chaos of dealing with tariffs and shifting populations adjusting to new trade flows and labor flows will create some adjustment costs which might well slow the British economy for the next year or two. However, the long-term benefits should outweigh those, both economically and culturally.

We shall see.

 

Leftist Blue Collar Blues

The British will be voting on leaving the EU later this month; "Brexit" is the buzzword for that, borrowing from the neologism "Grexit" when Greece nearly bolted the Euro a while back.

The prime motivators for the Leave camp are net cash flows away from the UK, unresponsive EU politics and a touch (or four) of nativism. Establishmentarians of both right and left are generally in the Remain camp, but both a Tea Party style right and a blue-collar left are often in the "Euroskeptic" camp. The left often wants more big government and more ability to regulate the economy (such that the left wing of French politics is anti-EU, for example) but blue-collar folks are more likely to be harmed by folks from poorer parts of the EU being able to freely move to Britain and compete for jobs.

This left-listing Guardian piece notes that the blue-collar folks (C2DE in UK econ-jargon) are 53-29 Leave while the white-collar block (ABC1) is 50-39 Remain. Blue-collar folks tend to be a bit less cosmopolitan than their betters and more sensitive to the economic effects of a common labor market. The writer, Polly Toyenbee (yes, she's a granddaughter of historian Arnold), bemoans the heaving playing of the nativist card to promote a Leave vote when good leftists shouldn't be making common cause with the Tory's right wing.

However, we're seeing across the board on both sides of the Atlantic where blue-collar folks respond well to nativist pitches; the new nativist ("hard-right" in Eurospeak) parties often draw more from the socialist left than the right. The nativist Freedom party in Austria skewed rural and blue collar, and the German AfD was getting more votes off of the Social Democrats and the neocommunist Left than the mainstream conservative CDU. On our side of the pond, The Donald skews downscale in his support.

That is even more pronounced in a vote that doesn't have a party attached to it. Labour has often lost votes in EU election to the Eurohostile UKIP. Those UKIP voters that vote Labour in House of Commons elections on economic grounds are free to vote to leave, then have a shot a seeing an anti-powers-that-be government manage the more-empowered UK government afterwards.

 

Blue Collar Traditionalists

We had another nativist victory in Austria earlier in the week, where their nativist Freedom Party's candidate came in first in the presidential election; he'll face a Green foe in the run-off, as the main center-right and center-left parties came up short.

The linked piece does a Q&A with an Austrian poli-sci prof, who makes this assessment along the way-

One factor behind the Freedom Party’s success is its status as an opposition party. It has attracted voters who aim to punish the current government for its performance. Without much government turnover, long-term party loyalties have frayed. For example, most blue-collar workers abandoned the Social Democrats and are now voting for the Freedom Party, making it, in effect, the new labor party.

The last German state elections had the same effect, where the nativist AfD was drawing votes from the left-of-center parties more than the center-right Christian Democrats.

There are some interesting applications for US politics. If The Donald does get the nomination, there might well be some blue-collar voters who are not social liberals who might warm to Trump. He's not an economic conservative despite being a billionaire, so he is less vulnerable to having the tool-of-big-business card played on him, especially when Hillary Clinton has just as many, if not more, corporate friends.

Where Trump resonates is with, as I've discussed before, blue-collar traditionalists

Blue-collar traditionalists don't have a natural home in either party. The usual mix of pro-business policies and social conservationism don't resonate overly well, but plays to patriotism and traditional culture do, especially when multiculturalism and hostility to traditional values become coins of the realm.

Since Trump hasn't tacked to the right on economics, he can have a shot at reaching some traditional Democratic voters in the general election. A more protectionist trade policy would help folks in manufacturing jobs that don't compete well with imports, and his immigration hawk persona will appeal to blue-collar Anglos, including some old-school blacks.

Blue-collar whites have become less and less of a Democratic strong suit in the last few decades. If a Republican can speak to the fears of globalism, secularism and open borders but not induce the fears of the safety net being scrapped, they could turn the US' main party of the right into "the new labor party" as well.

Green MACRS and Other Tax Differences

The EU made an interesting rule change with an eye to giving a country-by-country income statement of sorts-

Companies active in the EU with a revenue of more than €750 million will need to publish seven pieces of information in every country in which they operate: 1) the nature of their activities; 2) the number of their employees; 3) their total net turnover; 4) the profit made before tax; 5) the amount of income tax due in each country; 6) the one actually paid; and 7) the accumulated earnings, which is the net profit of the company after distributions to the stakeholders.

Most of that would be common knowledge for the firm as a whole, but getting a country-by-country breakdown would be informative and not overly burdensome for firms (they should have the information already for in-house use, especially if they're billion-dollar or close-to-it firms)...but have a few flaws that makes things misleading.

In a political environment that is on edge over tax-avoidance and evasion after the "Panama Papers" pointed out quite a bit of both, a lot of hay will be made over the difference between bullet points five and six. However, that difference is often due to a difference between financial accounting rules and tax accounting rules.

For instance, if a car is expected to last ten years, you'll depreciate it 100%/10 years= 10% a year for the numbers that go on the annual report and the 10-K form sent to the SEC.

However, the MACRS system in US tax law would have you writing it off in five years and somewhat front-load even that, so that you write off 20% in the first year and 32% in the second. That will create 10% extra depreciation in year 1 and 22% extra in year 2, which will lower taxable income and lower your tax bill. The sped-up write-offs were put in place in the 1980s in order to encourage investment.

That will generate a deferred income tax asset on the balance sheet and a gap between taxes that "should have been owed" if we used the "straight-line" 10% a year figure versus the actual tax bill figured with the kicked-up depreciation. Nothing fishy there other than the US government giving business a head start on writing off new plant and equipment.

Also, using past losses to offset part or all of current profits can help create that difference as well.

That means that a lot of those differentials are merely using tax law, often in ways blessed by the government. That fact will likely get lost 

 

Max Smart Goes to Dresden

I was looking over the data for Sunday's election in Germany, especially the results in Saxony. If I'm reading the results right (my 9th grade German class is way too rusty to help much), there is a workable civilized coalition of the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and the Greens, getting 30, 11 and 5 seats respectively, adding up to 46 seats out of 87. The communist Left ("die Linke" in German) and the anti-immigrant AfD got 17 and 24 respectively. 

The Greens had 5.19% of the vote, just above the 5% threshold for seats. Had they been at 4.99%, we would have been looking at a 41-41 dead heat or something close to it, depending on how the proportional-seat math played out with one less player. That would have meant cooperating with one of the parties that are persona-non-grata in coalition building in most cases. The AfD is truly on that list and I don't recall "Die Linke" being in government at the state level, even in eastern Germany where they have some residual support from the old days.

Saxony just missed a hung parliament by 0.19%

Cultural But Not Religious

You mow down 77 liberals and you're complaining about being in solitary? He even throws in a seig-heil for good measure. Not that I want to see Anders Behring Breivik harmed in prison, but he's lucky to be Norwegian where they don't have the death penalty.

He's been come to mind in the last few months as anti-immigrant fervor has his Europe and the US. Part of the logic of fearing non-European immigrants in both Europe and the US was that they don't fit into Christian territory. Even if the folks feeling that aren't all that devoutly or spiritually Christian, that's their cultural roots. Breivik is the Reductio ad Absurdum poster boy for that attitude, mowing down liberals for abetting the degrading of European culture.

Breivik cast himself as a "cultural Christian" a while back, appreciating western culture but noting that he was atheist. That would seem to describe a lot of the AfD backers in Germany as well, albeit without quite the murderous side-effects. Trump's defence of Christianity has quite a bit of that cultural-but-not-spiritual vibe to it, although your mileage may very.

It's important while we defend the faith, we don't confuse that with the culture, the country, or the continent that we live in. "Defending the faith" doesn't mean making fun of non-believers or mowing them down wholesale (or retail, for that matter); that only shows what we don't like rather than showing them what we do want to emulate.

The Anti-Immigrant Left?

Germany had three state elections today, allowing for a fresh test for anti-refugee sentiment. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) did rather well, coming in a solid second in southeastern Saxony and third in two southwestern states.

The Saxony result might create some interesting coalition building, as 45% of the vote went for somewhat establishment parties (30% Christian Democrat, 10% Social Democrat 5% Green) and 40% for the ultras (24% AfD and 16% reformed-Communist Left).

What's interesting is that the AfD seems to have taken more from the Social Democrats and Greens than from the CDU; they gained 19.7% above a flat-out white-supremacist party that got 4.7% in 2011. The CDU got trimmed by 2.5% from 2011, while the SDP lost 11%, the Left lost 7.6% and the Greens were trimmed by 2.1%. The libertarian Free Democrats picked up a percent, but not enough to get seats. Eyeballing that result, you'd assume the AfD was a leftist party, but the anti-immigrant slant has them cast as "far-right" in European nomenclature. 

The middle three should be about to command a majority and avoid having either the hard left or the nativist right in government. However, if the Greens were to fall back a notch and miss the 5% seat threshold, you could see the need to bring one of the two ultras into the mix. That would create quite a bit of gnashing of teeth.

Grand Coalition Rapids

Interesting times for a comparative-politics geek. We have so many hung parliaments in Europe that the price of rope is climbing.

Two months after their December elections, Spain has yet to see a government form. The election saw the rise of the centrist Citizens party and the anti-austerity Podemos ("We can") to make a coalition government of some sort needed, as the ruling right-of-center Popular Party got the most votes but well short of a majority, while their arch-rival Socialist Party (PSOE is their acronym en Español) getting a unsolid second, losing ground to Podemos on their left.

There's often enough bad blood between the two main parties to make "grand coalitions" of the two big-boys problematic. The PP has a few corruption scandals to work through, making them a less-than-savory senior partner. A center-left package of Podemos, the PSOE and Citizens is also problematic as Podemos wants a vote on independence for Catalonia which the other two view as anathema. 

New elections this spring are an option if no one can patch together a majority. Having a plurality government installed with the help of abstentions by a grudging silent partner (the Canadian liberals did that for a plurality Conservative government in the 'aughts) is a possible solution if cooler heads prevail, but that is also subject to said government being ousted on a no-confidence vote if the silent partner opts not to abstain courteously anymore.

_________

Ireland had their elections Saturday and are still putting the finishing touches on the counting, which uses multi-seat districts and preference voting, so the process of pruning the minor party votes and seeing what their second and third and fourth choices are can be time-consuming.

With ten seats still outstanding, the ruling coalition of Fine Gael and Labour have 53 seats, well short of a 80 seat majority. Fine Gael to me reminds me of Tony Blair and 90s-vintage Bill Clinton, mildly progressive and comfortable with a market economy. FG gets cast as "conservative" by many European writers, but would be left-of-center in an American telling of the tale.

Fine Gael's arch rival is the right-of-center Fianna Fail; the two have traded power for most of the last century. Both go back a century to independence, where Fianna Fail was part of the faction that at first wouldn't take their seats lest they pledge allegiance to the British King. After a decade, FF opted to start taking their seats, leaving Sinn Fein (often seen as the IRA party) as the primary abstentionist bloc. In the last few decades, Sinn Fein has come in out of the abstentionist (and oft-terroristic from The Troubles to the north) cold and set up shop as a hard-left party still bent on bringing Northern Ireland into the Irish fold, albeit peacefully.

FF has 43 seats as we go to press, and Sinn Fein clocks in at 22. Independents now have 16 seats and a hodgepodge of mostly leftist parties has another 14.

That leaves some sort of grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail as a logical choice; the two would have 90 seats between them, making Fine Gael more right than left on the Irish spectrum of 2016. However, logic is often in short supply after years of enmity between arch-rivals.

The alternative would be for Fine Gael to form some sort of center-left-hard-left coalition that would include Sinn Fein, since the math for FG getting something without either FF or SF would be a major struggle.

Dublin will see some serious sausage-making, as FG seems to be the fulcrum, having center-left or center-right coalitions within the realm of the feasible. A lot depends on whether Sinn Fein would be a manageable junior partner able to be part of the mundane features of running a country, something radical parties are often loathe to do, becoming the establishment they long despised.

[Update 11:25AM-Looks like Sinn Fein would rather be on the outside looking in, per party boss Gerry Adams (yes, the semi-reformed IRA guy)-"Sinn Féin made clear that we will not prop up the parties that created and sustained the crisis." implicitly blaming FF for creating the late-00s financial mess which hit Ireland very hard and FG for mismanaging the aftermath. If he sticks to his guns, a grand-coalition would be the path of least resistance.]

Jat Setters

Protesters sabotaged New Dehli's main canal, shutting off the majority of the city's drinking water. The issue as hand is whether to include a farming-class Jat caste in the group of lower-caste folks in India's version of affirmative action. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia for them would have them as spiritually plebian but economically middle class with a lot of political clout.

Trying to translate caste into a Western context doesn't work all that well, I'm picturing Scandinavian-Americans trying to get minority treatment; "yeah, yabetcha we need help getting work. After Fargo, no one takes us seriously."

An old saying comes to mind-politics is the answer to who gets what, when, where and how. That seems to apply in India as well.

Should They Stay or Should They Go?

What's fixin' to be the second most important election of the year will happen on June 23th. That's the date the British will vote on staying in the EU. All the main opposition parties are in favor of staying and Conservative PM David Cameron is looking to keep the UK in after getting some modest reforms OKed from EU leaders.

However, a number of Conservative are looking to leave the EU. A free trade zone is good economics, but an unresponsive central government with increasingly chafing laws rubs a lot of folks the wrong way. I'm not an expert on EU legislative dynamics, but it seems to be largely elite-driven, where factional leaders make deals with little room for pressure from voters. In an era where responsive government is more valued, the EU seems to be too big for popular pressure to make a dent.

Add to those structural issues the added pressure of folks from poorer parts of Europe flocking to Britain (movement by EU citizens within the EU isn't restricted) and boatloads of Arab and other refugees flocking into Europe (although those folks don't have automatic entree into the UK) and you get financial, political and culture clashes that makes the EU problematic for a lot of those Tory voters. Britain has stayed out of the Euro, so at least monetary policy has some wiggle room.

Some Conservative MPs have announced their intention to back the prime minister. The Labour Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru [Scottish and Welch nationalists respectively] and the Lib Dems are also in favour of staying in.

But many Conservatives have announced they will back the leave campaign including Mr Cameron's long-time ally, Justice Secretary Michael Gove.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who has previously been a Eurosceptic, has yet to declare where he stands.

If everyone but a handful of Conservatives are for it, why would the vote be in doubt?

One party not mentioned in the piece was the UK Independence Party, which got 26.6% of the vote in the last EU parliament election in 2014. They go past Eurosceptic and hit Eurohostile and have a nativist streak that makes them persona-non-grata with elites; sort of what the Tea Party would look like if they were a free-standing party. That's a proportional-representation election, so you don't have to worry about if you can get a plurality of the vote in your district.

In last year's British parliamentary elections, where they have American-style plurality-take-all district-by-district races, the UKIP got 13% but only 1 MP, as roughly half of that EU vote went to other parties that had a better chance of winning that district.

If we use the 2014 vote as a framework and give half of the Tories 23.1% to nearly all of the UKIP vote, we get 38% or so from the 49.7% from those two. If they can get 12% from the remaining 50.3% and/or get better than half of the Tory vote, a majority Leave vote is very feasible. Given that about 3% of the vote went to fringe Euroskeptic parties and some of the Northern Irish parties might have a Leave contingent, it wouldn't take much to get to 50%, especially when we've seen the Greek debacle and the current Syrian diaspora make the EU less of a bargain than 21 months ago.

That final sentence of the BBC excerpt is interesting. Johnson is a shoot-from-the-lip conservative that is seen as a rival to Cameron, who is from the moderate side of the party; the top-of-the-head analogy would cast Johnson as Newt Gingrich and Cameron as Lindsey Graham, a feisty righty versus a gentleman of the establishment middle.

If Johnson can get the Tory Leave vote up to two-thirds, it might tip the balance, and leave a pro-Stay Cameron out on a limb, leaving him to implement a velvet divorce from the EU that he opposed. Given that British parties are free to change prime ministers between elections, the Tories might want to have a pro-Leave guy in charge, and the leader in the clubhouse for that role would be Boris the Spider.

So, we might well have something other than a brokered convention to keep tabs of early this summer. Very interesting times

The 27% Solution

Interesting results from France's equivalent of state elections. The nativist National Front had the most votes in the first round last month, but didn't get a majority anywhere. However, the FN got shut out in the run-off, with the Socialists winning five regions and the mainstream conservative Republicans winning seven; a centrist coalition won the remaining mainland region. The two LePens, party leader Marine and niece Marion, came the closest, getting 42 and 45% respectively. Nationally, their vote total was 27% in both rounds, so they seem to be no-one's second choice.

27% looks familiar; it's about what The Donald is polling at in the GOP primaries. He's averaging 31% with a solid floor of 27%.

The FN gets the common moniker "far-right" when they are only rightist on immigration and other related issues; they are actually campaigning for more welfare spending, something that hardly cast them as supply-siders. The same can be said of Trump, who talks like a Tea Partier but is more a critter of the left (or at least center) on economic and cultural issues.

A number of polls show Ted Cruz closing in on Trump nationally and leading in Iowa. Trump is leading while we have a cast-of-thousands field, but may not do so for long. Presidential primaries don't have run-offs like France does for their elections, but the field will shrink as the season goes on; then, we might well see Trump stick at a 30% or so level while others sneak past him for a plurality.

"Western Civ Haram", meet "Kapitalism Haram"

Two news items caught my eye this afternoon during a tutoring lull. One was a museum shooting in Tunis and the other was a riot near the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt.

The former is designed to run westerners out of Tunisia, since the museum was loaded with European tourists looking at their collection of Roman artifacts; all but two of the 19 dead per the BBC were foreigners. That's militant Islam's game at present, de-westernizing the Muslim world. Nigeria's Boko Haram even has that as its name, "Western Education isn't kosher" would be a cheeky translation of their name. Their Tunisian buddies would be essentially saying that Western Civ is haram with their attack today.

If they keep turistas away from the country, it will weaken the ties with Europe and make a ISIS-style theocracy easier to achieve.

Meanwhile, we have a weenie roast in Frankfurt, where leftists are protesting the ECB actually making countries pay the debts their governments racked up. Police cars are getting torched by the usual suspects on the left- Blockupy is the broad term for this melange of leftists-

• Activists from Greece's radical left governing party Syriza and Spain's anti-corruption Podemos are joining the rally
• Also includes Germany's Die Linke and Occupy Frankfurt
• Rallying call: "They want capitalism without democracy, we want democracy without capitalism"

Or, if we can put an Islamic spin on it, "Kapitalism Haram." They would like to turn Europe into some sort of socialist state where foreign bankers aren't welcome.

The end game might see the north side of the Med as isolated as the south, at least economically.

Without financing from the more developed parts of Europe, a rejectionist south would have to maintain an roughly even balance of trade, since investors will avoid those countries and also avoid having the local currency. They'll also either have to raise taxes or confiscate property to make up any deficits that are currently being financed by foreign loans.

It's not a pretty future.

From Maastricht to Mas Strict

The center surely didn't hold in the Greek elections. They've been dealing with some serious budget cutting as of late in order to get a huge deficit in order and keep in the EU's good graces, needing two elections in 2012 to get a workable coalition of the right-of center New Democracy and the mainstream socialist PASOK. The "austerity" budgets have helped create high (25% or so) unemployment and fostered the rise of an anti-austerity left wing Syriza party.

Syriza came in a close second in that second 2012 poll with 17% of the vote. Yesterday, they doubled that with a 36% showing. That was good for 99 of the 250 seats divvied up by proportional representation. Add the 50 seats that gets tacked on as a bonus to the plurality party and Syriza came up with 149 of the 300 seats, just short of a majority.

News of the morning has Syriza teaming up with the paleoconservative Greek Independents to form a majority. Note that these aren't the Naziesque Greek-supremacist Golden Dawn, The Indy-Greeks sound more like Pat Buchanan as Greek Orthodox by way of the UK Independence Party than straight-up bigots.

Culturally, the two get along about as well as Tea Partiers would get along with Occupy Wall Street folks, but they both have a common populist distrust of centralization of power.  Syriza's new partners don't like the EU much and like the austerity cram-down even less, so they can form a working coalition for the moment.

New Democracy didn't do that badly, only 2% worse than 2012B. Syriza gained 9%, mostly out of the hide of PASOK, who came in 7th and last (among parties that broke the 3% seat-getting barrier) at 5%. There isn't a coherent pro-austerity majority to be had at this point, so, to borrow from Samizdata's evoking of Mencken, the Greek public will get what it wants....good and hard.

The new government will try to talk the EU and the European Central Bank into easing up on the austerity and giving them some forgiveness on their debt. However, doing so will encourage other countries to do likewise, with Spain first on that list with a Syriza-flavored Podemos party (they could have gone with Si Podemos and got the echos of Obama's "Yes, we can" down perfectly) poised to do well in their next national election.

We could well see Greece leave the EU in the next year or two if the rest of the EU isn't interested in big bailouts of their southern tier. It will be interesting geopolitics and international finance, bringing the creation of the Euro that started a quarter-century ago to an inflection point.

When I was taking my International Econ minor in grad school in the early 90s, the Maastricht Treaty that set up the framework for what became the Euro was news. The British were initially in the system, but opted to bail in 1992 when propping up the pound to keep it in synch with the other pre-Euro currencies was too much to handle.

Now, the Greeks are poised to do likewise two decades later, seeing the heirs of Maastricht being way too strict for them.

 

 

Silent Majority, Meet "Invisible French" Majority

Here's an interesting and surprisingly even-handed BBC piece on France's nativist National Front party; they got their first seats in the French Senate this weekend. It does start by noting the unsavory past of the party, but continues to note the real appeal of an anti-immigrant, anti-EU pitch-

According to the social geographer Christophe Guilluy, there is a new divide in France: between the "metropolitan' and the "periphery". Front National voters are the French of the "periphery".

These are the people from the country, and small towns, and the sprawling new housing estates that form the outer, outer ring of cities like Paris.

That is a divide that resonates on this side of the Atlantic as well. Eastern Colorado and northernmost California both have succession movements going.

Increasingly those living inside the cities, says Mr Guilluy, are the well-off white-collar workers and the immigrants: both classes of people that benefit from globalisation.

In the periphery are the losers - people on modest incomes who are "no longer integrated economically, socially and culturally in the life of the nation". And they are 65% of the population.

The rich can afford the big cities. The poor get help affording it. The folks in between are on the outside looking in, in more ways than one.

"Contrary to what their elites keep telling them, the French have a very clear idea of what's happened in French society, because they live it in their flesh.

"For 30 years now they've been repeated the same message - that they'll benefit from globalisation and multiculturalism. But they don't. Their analysis is rational, relevant and above all it's the majority view."

There's somewhat more benefits to globalization in the US than in France thanks to a more market-friendly system and multiculturalism is more adjusting to nominally Catholic Hispanic immigrants than nominally Muslim immigrants from Africa in France. American small-towns are more religious than French ones, and it's more secularization that has hit the US provincials harder than multiculturalism.

However, an anti-immigrant, pro-traditional-culture, anti-centralization vibe runs in common with both. Tea Party folks can be paleoconservative reactionaries as well as libertarians, but the National Front tends to be more paleo and not very libertarian in its economics.

[National Front leader] Marine Le Pen adroitly articulates the feelings of these "invisible French". They see in her one of them.

That "invisible French" line sounds quite like Nixon's Silent Majority, appealing to blue-collar conservatives who didn't like where the culture was going in the late 1960s. Many of those folks voted for George Wallace's 1968 third-party run (and his 1972 run in the Democratic primaries); a law-and-order "Southern Strategy" looked to turn those Yellow Dog Democrats into Republicans without being (at least overtly) racist.

The difference here is that Le Pen isn't Tricky Dick, she's George Wallace's more-inclusive daughter, if I can compare her dad Jean Marie Le Pen to Wallace. If the Southern Strategy wasn't tried, playing to redneckish voters fears without directly playing to their ethnocentrism and racial fears, we might have had a nativist third party develop in the US.

French conservatives (or what passes for conservative in France) have played a variant of the Southern Strategy before, as this blog post from 2003 comes to mind, acting tough on lawless Muslim youth without being directly anti-Muslim. Being anti-veils comes into play as well from time to time as well.

However, when you add economic stagnation to that cultural indigestion and mainstream pol of both left and right who can't seem to do much to help that French Silent Majority, we see the National Front picking up that part of the political ecology, playing George Wallace without a Richard Nixon to counter him.

The Scottish independence vote had William Wallace invoked quite a bit, at least in US commentary on it. We may have another Wallace to keep in mind to their south.

The SNP Gets Fishier

The Scottish independence vote went 55% No and Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond will step aside once a replacement is voted in at a November party convention.

He said there were a "number of eminently qualified and very suitable candidates" to replace him.

But Nicola Sturgeon, the current deputy first minister and deputy SNP leader, is seen as a clear frontrunner.

We go from a Salmon[d] who couldn't quite make it all the way upstream to a Sturgeon.

They'll have to figure out what their future looks like when they're a tad short on support for breaking away. Would this be a high-water mark on independence, or will London look more toxic in the years to come that could generate a majority win in the near future?

The SNP's status begs comparison to the Parti Quebecois. The PQ (and their BQ federal incarnation) have managed to be the party of the left in Quebec politics despite falling short on two independence votes. However, as of late, they've started to run out of gas, losing support to a conservative soft-separatist CAQ in provincial elections and to the leftist New Democrats on the federal level in the last election.

The PQ has become a Francophone party of the left as independence becomes a distance goal. Will the SNP be merely a Scottish party of the left at this point, or will they have a selling point that differentiates themselves from Labour and the Liberal Democrats?

Think Ethnocentric

An old Smothers Brothers album title came to mind when I saw the results of Sweden's election. Proportional representation has let its legislature with a result that Germany has seen quite a bit in recent history, a result that forces the mainstream parties to set up a grand coalition.

In Germany, it was the not-quite-reformed-enoough Communist "Left Party" that is persona-non-grata in coalitions. If neither the Social Democrat-Green coalition of the left or the Christian Democrat-Free Democrat coalition of the right could get to a majority, you got the SDU and the CDU working in an awkward "grand coalition" government.

In Sweden, we have the parties of the left getting 158 seats, the current right-of-center collation getting 142 votes and the nativist Sweden Democrats getting 49 seats. A feminist party just missed the 4% cutoff for getting votes, which might well have cost the left a working coalition.

"Far right" is the common application for the SD's, but their platform is mostly conservative on immigration and social issues rather than economics; that's true of France's National Front as well, where that nativist party is not all that conservative on economics, either. The SD have some Nazi-style types in their party history, but they've seemingly moderated in the last two decades, drawing votes from the mainstream conservative parties and coming in with 13% of the vote, good for third place.

Anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim immigrant, feelings seem to be driving the Sweden Democrats' vote. However, their goal of being "Kingmaker" assumes that the nobility of the other parties deign to work with them.

The leading parties of left and right, then Social Democrat and the Moderates respectively, could rule without any other help, having 197 seats, well over the 175 that would be a simple majority. Or, the left coalition could bring one of the smaller right-of-center parties on board to patch together a coalition.

This might be a wave of the future in countries with proportional representation; if nativist parties drawing energy from multicultural dysfunction make it impossible for a right-of-center coalition to be made without them, then these rudderless "grand coalitions" might be the norm.

Such nativist parties seem to be growing rather than shrinking. One news item of late gives us the odd sight of seeing French Jews supporting the National Front, seeing them as their best defense against French Muslims despite having some strong anti-Semitic vibes in their nativism. A somewhat less nativist and more economically conservative UK Independence Party did well in the last EU election, getting the most votes; they could well be the largest party in Parliament, especially if Scotland opts to leave the UK later this week.

Of the nativist parties in western Europe, only the Dutch Freedom Party has been allowed into a coalition government. If that exclusion continues, we might see more of these grand coalitions

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