The left-liberal side of politics in England is anyway divided between Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens. Keir Starmer has so far failed to do with Labour what Biden managed with the Democrats – bringing together left and centre, young, university-educated urban cosmopolitans and more traditional working-class voters. Whereas Biden’s personal skills as a great conciliator and the United States’ seemingly unshakeable two-party system provided an united opposition to defeat Trump, Johnson has the good fortune to face a trebly divided opposition. “Is he lucky?” The question Napoleon is supposed to have asked about one of his generals can be answered in Johnson’s case with “so far, yes”. Meanwhile, the negative economic consequences of Brexit have been driven off the front page by the pandemic, and can be rhetorically concealed behind the impact of Covid. To be fair, in stark contrast to Trump, the Johnson government has also delivered an impressive vaccine rollout, which is one of the biggest explanations of its success in the local elections last week and a key byelection in the former Labour stronghold of Hartlepool. Brexit may have happened, but the identity politics of Brexit remain a potent force. The scandal around the luxurious refurbishment of Johnson’s flat in Downing Street, the extraordinary access enjoyed by Brexit-supporting billionaire James Dyson and the now collapsed Greensill Capital, and the planning permission row surrounding the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, all speak of a Trump-like intertwining of government, party and plutocratic interests.Īt the same time, Johnson has delivered psychologically and culturally to a significant swathe of England in much the same way that Trump did in the US, although with a better sense of humour. After its recent electoral victories, the Johnson government faces the choice of continuing with plutocratic populism or going beyond it. The British government was rumoured to be contemplating a similar capital gains tax hike in the last budget, but nothing happened. Hence his pathbreaking proposal that capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income. That applies especially to the super-rich, who have done disproportionately well out of four decades of financialised globalisation: the share of private wealth held by the top 0.1% in the US tripled from 7% in the late 1970s to about 20% in 2019. If he can get enough of his current $6tn (£4.2tn) proposals for post-Covid recovery, infrastructure and welfare spending through Congress, there will be echoes of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal.Īlthough Biden comes from a part of the Democratic party that itself became too close to financial interests, he has recognised that the rich must do more to pay for this transformation. President Biden now has four years to prove that actually giving people decent healthcare, education, social security and job prospects will prevail over the very real emotional power of nationalist, populist narratives. Trump was only denied a second term because of the unity of a single-party opposition behind Joe Biden, whose “hardscrabble from Scranton” life story and down-home style also appealed to a part of Trump’s electorate. He appealed to the 90% while in practice promoting the interests of the 1%. The emotional politics of identity trumped the rational politics of social and economic interest. He gave Americans who had felt ignored and disrespected the feeling that he was on their side, and even “one of them” – the blue-collar millionaire taking up the white man’s burden. Trump did deliver culturally and, so to speak, psychologically. Support for populism is a cultural as much as an economic phenomenon. In the process the analysis provides a multilayered contribution toward understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power.Why? Because we use the word “delivery” too narrowly. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolizes the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of “traveling up the social ladder,” to validate their actions. Analyzing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift and the first photograph’s later life as a social media meme. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary “winners,” or what it calls normcore plutocrats. This article analyzes two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage-one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore, and Raheem Kassam-standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |