
All around the world, nationalists are gaining ground. Why? - amexrap
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21710276-all-around-world-nationalists-are-gaining-ground-why-league-nationalists
======
striking
I'll directly quote a comment by HN user thewarrior
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907320)),
one of my favorite comments, here:

\---

It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the
heels of BREXIT this is a trend.

The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to
fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia
unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The
globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population.
Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the
sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.

Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture.
Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their
concerns and try to assuage them.

There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right
"left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need
to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing
order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of
comparitive advantage.

If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European
nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a
much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we
need when we face planet scale threats like global warming. Get out of your
bubble.

Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.

The divide is bridged one person at a time.

PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK
with the mods.

EDIT: His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to
appreciate what he's been entrusted with.

~~~
allemagne
The majority of voters voted against Trump.

~~~
sremani
This was the exact explanation[1] given in India when the Left and INC were
getting into a "unholy" alliance to form government. I find this hilarious, by
the extension of the argument, majority of voters voted against every
candidate.

edit: [1]the argument was majority of voters voted against BJP.

------
Diederich
People are more afraid of more things than ever.

Many of the fears are quite concrete and actionable, such as climate change
displacement.

My theory is that in an age of 'infinite communication' and 'infinite
information', few people can keep a conscious and subconscious rational, risk
appropriate outlook when bombarded with an endless array of not only bad news
but also associated vivid imagery.

Even though we as a species are safer than we ever have been, even though
women are doing better than ever, even when the worst kinds of poverty are at
historic lows, we're more afraid than ever. (Note: I'm not saying things are
all peachy, and we have a long ways to go, but the historical trends are
clear) Our evolutionary psychology is based on over-reaction to bad things,
because that has been, for nearly all of our existence, a survival advantage.

Now, though we try to look at things rationally, that evolutionary baggage is
still there, making us afraid, on conscious and subconscious levels.

That's one part of it. The other part is the more directed role technology
plays.

Social media wants as much of our attention as possible. That's a business
model.

I think they have discovered, via actual direction and/or via various machine
learning sources, that our attention is maximized when we are formed into
like-minded groups or tribes, and when those tribes are 'fighting' inside the
social media lobster cage.

I don't mean to say that there aren't 'villains and heroes', because there
certainly are.

But I do believe that most of this churn is straightforward, natural and even
an inevitable result of the explosive increase in connectivity and
communication capabilities.

In short, technology is the main reason we're getting kind of crazy. And I
have no good ideas about how to realistically bend the curve back toward less
crazy.

------
helpfulanon
Based on the tone of comments around here lately, I'm getting the sense that
HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now.

~~~
newswriter99
"closeted alt-right"

Alt-right is just a meaningless catch-all term to describe someone who is
sarcastic and "not-liberal."

According to this definition, Bill Hicks was alt-right. Thus, the term has
zero value.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I disagree with both of you.

helpfulanon: I think there are more people than you expected here who are
willing to state that they lean right. (That's not the same as "closeted alt-
right" by any means.) Some of those people are a bit strident right now. But
there are a bunch of people who lean left who are pretty bitter, too. And I
think that the only thing that changed was that we had an election. Those
people who lean right, leaned right before the election. They didn't just come
here in the past week to triumphantly throw their weight around.

newswriter99: According to _your_ definition. I don't think that's the right
definition, though. Wikipedia's definition seems pretty accurate: "The alt-
right is a loose group of people with far right ideologies who reject
mainstream conservatism in the United States." That's why they're "alt" \-
they reject the normal, mainstream right. So not everyone who voted Republican
is alt-right. Trump, however, is certainly not a candidate who embraced normal
conservatism, so it might be fair to call him an alt-right candidate.

~~~
newswriter99
The Wikipedia goes on to say (also, quoting Wikipedia as a source, kek) that
there's no telling how many of the "alt-right" are trolling, how many are dead
serious, and how many fall in between.

I repeat my previous statement: the term is meaningless.

~~~
pwinnski
One tell of someone who supports the goals of the alt-right is use of oddball
terms like "kek." So you're not a disinterested bystander curious about the
labeling of the alt-right, you are most likely a member of the alt-right, and
as claimed above, attempting to extend the Overton window.

------
h4nkoslo
The present internationalist regime is a holdover from the Cold War.
Institutions (social or political) like the EU or Buckleyite conservatism or
the promotion of a trans-national, US educated elite itself (eg Barack Obama
Sr) were explicitly founded & run with a mission of countering the USSR.

With the collapse of the USSR & communism generally, these institutions no
longer had a sensible mission and started spiraling into rent-seeking and self
perpetuation without any sensible feedback being exerted on them, to the point
where they began to feed on the populace.

------
pipio21
"Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched not just for the glory of France but for
liberty, equality and fraternity."

Ohh, man, I can't withstand "The economist" anymore. The non sense propaganda
is growing and growing as they feel their Keynesian power threatened .
Napoleon destroyed my native country, Spain and half of Europe because of just
one thing, personal glory.

Napoleon was a sociopathic ambitious man who claimed to be against Monarchy
but declared himself Emperor and his son and family as Throne's heirs.

There is always good words with any invasion. Liberty, equality and fraternity
are destroyed when you have to use blood, extortion and humiliation in order
to impose them.

In Spain there were people that followed those values, in peace, the
"afrancesados", but most of them revolted against France when the invasion
happened.

French people consider Napoleon a hero, like Lincoln or Washington in the USA
or Bolivar in Venezuela, I understand it, every country has their heroes but
the Economist?.

The Economist have been going to big contortions in their arguments in order
to defend the Keynesianism order. For example Hillary earning a quarter
million dollars for a single speech from the same people that later benefits
from her politics was totally normal because scientific Nobel prices could win
50.000 after having changed the world in something.

Now reading the article I don't know how to start, it colvolves and cortorts
again the arguments in order to portray as lunatics anyone against the Soros
worldview.

I travel around the world around and I see different cultures, what the
Economist interest represent is creating a single world country with a single
currency, with a single elite in charge.

But people want to preserve their culture and their interests and it is
totally ok and good for the world.

In the past we had competition in policies, we could see West Germany with an
economic system and East Germany with another and we could compare.

Now this people want nobody to be able to compare, they want all the world
banning cash, all the world with negative interest rates, all the world
printing money like crazy, Corporations having more power that States.

And they don't want competition, because if someone else follows other
policies, it could prove their system not being so good as they claim it to
be.

------
hkmurakami
When a country's economy falters, the first reaction is usually nationalism,
whether it be through state directed propaganda (e.g. China) or self directed
by the maligned (e.g. US, Britain). Scapegoats feel good.

------
vtange
I have a feeling we're all trying to imitate China. For at least a decade now
a dominant rhetoric has been, 'China spends all their time and effort focused
on their own country, as opposed to being involved in human rights, foreign
aid and foreign wars, and look at how much GDP growth they're getting!

At the same time however, I feel that there has also been a 'push back' effect
in terms between local and global culture. With every move we make trying to
stitch together the world with a unified, global ideals system, the value of
local culture and traditions gets magnified, especially among conservatives
and nationalists.

In a world under economic stress, it is easy for nationalists to win when all
they have to do is point to China's growth story.

------
PaulHoule
Tariffs are one thing, but since the 1990s globalization has been about "non-
tariff trade barriers" which seems to be a euphemism for environmental, health
and safety laws.

------
ismail
What is the difference between populism and nationalism?

Niall Fergusson seems to think that it is populism we are facing around the
world specifically in the northern hemisphere. The experiment seems to have
failed in other countries.

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/28/having-
populi...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/28/having-populist-
moment/zjlU4sGIT7NMieozkmnfbO/story.html)

~~~
krzyk
You could ask similar question: what is the difference between socialism and
populism?

All extremes are bad.

------
tdkl
Lying about "fake news" after the loss by media doesn't help either :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyS3Ghevf2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyS3Ghevf2I)

------
drinchev
Really nice article.

Last week I was at Websummit in Lisbon. Right after Trump won the election,
there was a lot of noise about it and almost every talk included some comments
about where the world is going to. Sadly one of the talks was about AI and
robots, which included a demo of a robot, that was promised to "Replace people
in child-care, public service, restaurants, etc.". Boy, I was so shocked when
they said that. The only way that you can fix this statement is with the
follow up : "Once we have the basic income, technology won't be so unfair".

------
zzleeper
For me the most interesting chart is #2, "My Country is the Best Country in
the World".

Some countries (US, AUS, and a bit less the UK) show a marked divide between
young and old responders for this.

Any ideas why?

~~~
klank
The younger ones see what the older ones are doing?

------
zxcvvcxz
Maybe because you can't force globalism and multiculturalism down people's
throats.

Maybe there should be actual sensible discussions about the merits and
drawbacks of these concepts, rather than name-calling and assumed acceptance.

~~~
benbenolson
While your comment is rather snarky, I think the sentiment is true: many
people are tired of being called racists, bigots, misogynists, etc., for
simply opposing nationalism. At the same time, much has been revealed through
various leaks, pulling back the curtain on various activities that many don't
agree with.

I think this mentality of "the people versus the elites" (aka populism) has
caught on quickly throughout the world, with the refugee and immigration
issues being a catalyst.

~~~
robotresearcher
| many people are tired of being called racists, bigots, misogynists, etc.,
for simply opposing nationalism

Now I'm completely confused. Is this really happening?

~~~
benbenolson
Oh, sorry, I must have not been paying attention. I mean "supporting
nationalism."

