At the same time, its opponents, when attempting to seriously analyse the phenomenon, acknowledge that its success is down to new parties and leaders acknowledging (or, at worst, 'pandering to') the general public's mistrust of elites, and their efforts to redress injustices or imbalances.
As such, populism, 'right-wing' or otherwise, surely then invigorates democracy, expanding and enacting the 'democratic will of the people'. Why then are its opponents so vociferously ranged against it?
On this episode of NewsReal, Joe & Niall discuss the emergent (and increasingly dominant) political theory of the times.
Running Time: 01:23:58
Download: MP3
Here is the transcript:
Niall: Hello and welcome to another episode of NewsReal with Joe and Niall.
Joe: I'm Joe.
Niall: I'm Niall. Today is Sunday, November 25th and this week we're going to discuss populism.
Joe: Among other things.
Niall: Among other things. Populism. What is it? Whence it came? Where is it going?
Joe: You may have heard about it.
Niall: Yeah, it's a discussion many people are having. It's been going on for the last three years obviously since Trump and Brexit we hear a lot about it. It's interesting that it took those two events for so many people who previously maybe disregarded it to actually pay attention to the term and the phenomenon as they see it. People have a lot of opinions about it and there are probably as many opinions as there are people and so we're not going to try and actually lock down any kind of definition.
What I would say is that what they all seem to have in common, whether someone is looking at it as something that's just horrific and threatening to destroy life as we know it or on the opposite end of the spectrum, as the thing that's here to save us all, it seems that the common denominator is that the fundamental observation is that it begins with a world view where there are masses of people and then there are elites. Now you might say so what, but what's striking about those who are horrified by it - so primarily you see them in the media mainstream voices - what strikes is that when they're writing about it and informing us what they've just realized, apparently, is that it's based on a world view where there are masses of people and then elites and that there's some kind of rather fundamental difference between them, is that this is new to them. They appear to have never conceived of it this way before.
It's strange. For us and for our listeners it's like, "Well yeah, the sky is blue." That's exactly how we've been framing and seeing and talking about all these topics, world events since forever. Of course there are. It's self-evidently true. But what appears to be going on here is a kind of awakening in, let's say the intelligentsia, which probably incorporates the elites, and a lot of ordinary people who tend to side with them maybe, that there is such a division. It seems to be a shocking novelty to them that there are people out there who can see the world in such a way.
Joe: If we go back to 2011 you had Occupy Wall Street, we had the 99% against the 1%. So it's at least seven years old in its modern incarnation, you know?
Niall: Right.
Joe: And certainly the western media commented on that widely, the 99%.
Niall: But that was not...
Joe: So they can't make any claims....
Niall: That was not termed populism.
Joe: But it obviously was by definition. There's only a couple of definitions of populism. It's not very well defined but there's only a couple of definitions of populism, mainly, it's what you said already. One of them is a large mass of people being in opposition to a smaller group, usually a smaller group of rich elite people and the rest of the people against them or it's more generally defined in the general sense, the engagement of the population in political decision-making.
So one's a kind of more historical, I suppose, definition that draws on events from history where ordinary people were rabble-roused to fight against a small, rich elite, the politician, whatever and the other definition is a more general definition, a more political definition, let's say, in terms of actually defining what it is objectively. But that second definition of the popular engagement of the population in political decision-making...
Niall: On the face of it that should be the good thing.
Joe: Well it's the definition of democracy, no?
Niall: Yeah. But it's a negative. Are they indirectly telling people when they use the pejorative iteration of populism, are they indirectly saying, "Y'all aren't supposed to be involved in this? We'll tell you what to do."
Joe: Well it exposes the lie of democracy effectively when people don't like populism. Even in those two definitions, whichever one you pick, it's essentially the mobilization of ordinary people, not directly into politics, but certainly giving them a more direct say in what happens in political decision-making. It's the tyranny of the masses. You can see how that would be associated with communism, become the Bolshevik revolution, that kind of stuff, where ordinary people rose up. The proletariat rise up and overthrow the corrupt elite. That's populism in its pejorative sense and you could even say Hitler might have been a bit populist. So it has the connotation of whipping the ordinary people up and exploiting them even. That's why certain people give it a negative connotation, that it's exploiting the emotional fervour of the people and whipping it up for the political aims of some other elite faction to simply take power, like Hitler did.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: But on the face of it, the definition of populism itself in the dictionary is just grassroots democracy and democracy is government by the people. So what's grassroots then? Grassroots tends to suggest a more rural type dweller so maybe the under classes. So if you put it all together it has this connotation of the under classes or the lower classes, rising up against a corrupt elite.
Niall: And more specifically, in a lot of cases for the first time, beginning to participate in politics. But the option was always there for them to participate.
Joe: Well...
Niall: They're now actively or increasingly doing so.
Joe: Or more likely getting a leader who appears to pander to those people's interest directly and says, "I'm going to serve your interests". Kind of like Trump does, right? "I'm going to serve the working man" except the problem with the idea of it just being the under classes is that it's more popular these days because more and more people have become the under or lower classes. From an economic point of view, for sure, in terms of the reduction in wages and the destruction of the middle class and all that kind of stuff, but also in terms of people's psychology, in terms of their resentment towards people in authority, the ruling class today.
It's not just historically the lower classes have much more reason to rise up and protest in the streets because they were the first to suffer, but now more people are suffering in different ways up through the strata of the classes. So you have a rise in populism which is this idea of more and more people getting angry at the elite. That's what populism effectively means, ordinary people getting angry at the elite.
Niall: And the horrified pearl-clutching that takes place is either left unstated or it's explicitly stated. It depends on what context and how they use it, by bringing up the two examples you just mentioned, namely Nazi Germany and the Soviet system, the Bolshevik system.
Joe: It's synonymous with mob rule.
Niall: Mob rule. But there's something that they're overlooking here. Today there's no one who is in any way a successful populist leader or party or movement...
Joe: Apart from Donald Trump.
Niall: ...No, including him, that has not used the ballot and then once in, is not threatening to do away with democracy.
Joe: No. But there's no implication in the idea of populism that it's anti-democratic. It's actually fully democratic. It's always by democratic means. It's just the wrong demographic that is getting a lot of attention or representation in politics, or the wrong demographic in the sense of the demographic has gone wrong in general. Most of the voters are doing something wrong, i.e., they're no longer happy or willing or content to supposedly invest their power or their will in their elected representatives because more and more of them have become disenchanted with their elected representatives.
Obviously democracy is not what they say it is. It's not really the will of the people. It's only the will of the people exercised or invested in their political representatives as long as the people are happy or content for those political representatives to make all the decisions, as long as they're happy with those representatives. That's when democracy works. When they're no longer happy with those representatives, it's no longer democratic according to popular opinion, let's say, or the ruling class themselves of course, this is no longer democratic. When the people turn on their elected representatives and say "We don't like you anymore", when you have protests like you have today in France and a general anti-establishment sentiment among people, that's not democratic.
Technically it is of course democratic. It's almost even more democracy. It's a more direct influence of the people on the political processes and politicians. But from the politicians' point of view that's actually less democracy because it holds the threat of mob rule and some kind of a turnover into some kind of anarchy or totalitarianism, the system being radically changed overnight by this mob who wants to exercise their democratic rights. With someone else though, some radically different group of individuals because these ones that we have, the existing establishment in different countries, more and more people are thinking, "They're no good. They're corrupt. We don't like them. Get them out. They're evil" and that's no longer democratic.
So it's just stupid. It seems ridiculous in a certain sense. It's playing with words and toying with words in that sense. There's nothing fixed about democracy. It's democracy with strings attached. Most people recognize that it's an imperfect system. There is no perfect political system.
Niall: The way you just described it reminds me of the term "managed democracy". Managed democracy was explicitly formulated and articulated by the early Putin administrations in Russia. So right there, is a political theory on paper that's exactly the same thing, west and east, and yet Putin is held up as the example of where the terror, the horror of the rise of populism in the west could end up if we don't do something about this now. You could end up with a system where there's managed democracy but that's exactly how we handle democracy. We manage it.
So it's all totally meaningless OR there's a meaning behind the terms that are being used. There are things that are not being said or that people are not yet aware of that speak to the real difference, whatever it is, between, in this case, two forms of managed democracy. What is it that differentiates the two of them?
A case in point...
Joe: Good leaders and bad leaders.
Niall: Good leaders and bad leaders. Okay, where is the good and bad? You still have this, 'how do you decide which is which?'. The Atlantic does this all the time. I found an article talking about NATO and 'What are we going to do about this problem where we now have free NATO countries that are ruled by populists?' They didn't put that term in quote marks but that's what they meant.
So specifically their problem was that Orbán, Erdogan and the Polish Prime Minister, who's arguably not the strong man in that country - it's the guy behind the scenes called Kaczyński - but anyway, those three countries, Poland, Hungary and Turkey, seek to govern in a manner closer to that of Putin.
Joe: That gets back to...
Niall: So I'm like, "What does that mean? In what manner does Putin govern?"
Joe: It gets back to the question of good and bad leaders, what are good and bad leaders? A good leader, from the people's point of view, is a leader that primarily focuses on America first, or the country first or putting the interests of the people first and a bad leader is one who doesn't do that, who focuses on his own interests or the interests of other groups outside of the country, but doesn't speak in a way that conveys that sentiment of 'your interests first', the people's interests first and doesn't take action to back that up. That's a bad leader and people ultimately will turn on those leaders because 'You're the leader of THIS country. You're not the leader of another country and the taxes we pay to you should not be going to other countries around the world or other projects that don't foremost focus on our welfare. We pay taxes for the infrastructure in OUR country. We don't pay taxes so that you can give them to supporting the infrastructure of other countries.'
That obviously then leads directly into nationalism. It is nationalistic to focus on your own country first or that nationalism is a bad word so leaders that are populist, i.e., they appeal to what the ordinary people in that country want and what the ordinary people in that country want is for the government to focus first and foremost on them and that is by definition then called nationalistic because you're focused on your nation. All these suggestions that you can then throw in racism and xenophobia is bullshit. That's not actually the case at all. People who focus on their own interests - does anybody who listens to this show focus on their interests first? When you go to work and you get your salary, do you primarily use that salary to reinforce your own interests, let's say? Obviously you do.
So expand that out to a country level. It's a natural thing for human beings to do, to take care of themselves first because to do otherwise is a really bad idea because people will start to feel like they're disenfranchised and they're not being well looked after. Their standard of living is dropping. So this whole thing that we throw in, just by saying, "Because Hitler", it means nationalism is racist, there's also "because Hitler" because of some single historical event is complete bunk because nationalism exists on its own as a sentiment of political movement or ideology that has existed throughout history. It doesn't mean that you hate other people, or that you're racist, or that you want to go and invade other countries. It means that you're interested in looking after your own interests first.
So that's what a good leader does, by definition. It's not rocket science that people in a country would support that kind of leader over a different kind of leader or a different kind of leadership. They would support leadership and say, "This is good leadership, the leadership that focuses on the ordinary people's interests" because ultimately they elected this leadership in theory. That's where the democracy part comes in, right? "We elected you to do what? Well to look after us."
But it's bad apparently. It's evil. So there's a whole sentiment coming from somewhere, from some other establishment - the term 'globalist' comes in - a globalist establishment that is the antithesis of nationalism, so a clique of transnational politicians or industrialists or whatever you want to call it, do not like this idea of nationalism because it works against their interests where rather than seeing one country as their home that they should serve, the whole world is theirs and maybe they want to own all of it or own as much of it as possible so nationalism is a problem for them. They see the world as a small place.
Niall: And justifiably so because over the last 70 years since WWII so much of it has become structurally interlinked, the supply chains for companies and not even just the large conglomerates that don't see borders and they move their revenues here so it avoids taxes and all these things.
Joe: Right.
Niall: And they make use of the options that are available to them. But even at smaller more local levels, down to small and medium business it's the same thing. It's not so black and white. People do want a degree of openness.
Joe: But in a nationalistic setting small companies and small businesses would be able to trade with other countries, no problem. In the EU you can facilitate that kind of thing through trade deals and open borders, free trade agreements, all that kind of stuff. Just because you have your own borders around your country and your own national interests, obviously part of your national interest is to do good deals with other countries and to increase trade with other countries that's ideally beneficial for everybody.
But some of the big multi-national corporations make more money than many smaller countries so some of those corporations, by definition, have the financial clout of countries themselves and they are obviously not nationalistic in the sense that they don't exist in any particular country. Certainly they don't see themselves as being limited to one country. They don't have allegiance to any one country necessarily because they want to spread their influence all around the world. Corporations want to have headquarters in many countries in the world.
But then that obviously breaks down the idea of nationalism or serving one country first because how can a corporation decide which country it's going to show allegiance to if it's got headquarters in half the countries in the world. That's the problem of globalism.
Niall: Steve Bannon is going around stil, on a lecture tour. Recently he gave a speech at Oxford University Students' Union.
Joe: Did he wear a top hat?
Niall: I'm surprised they let him because a number of his other speaking arrangements were cancelled. But in some cases he's successful. He spoke at Oxford. I listened to a part of it. He talks about three extinction level events.
Joe: Extinction.
Niall: Extinction level events. The first one he puts down to China, which I'll get back to in a minute, because he puts that first in time as around 2000-2001. But the next one was the one people can all agree on, the 2008 financial crash.
Joe: He means economic extinction by extinction level events?
Niall: I think it's ELEs. It's extinction level, like these are serious crises that we need to do something about or, as he calls it, the Judeo-Christian world is done.
Joe: Okay. Extinction of the west.
Niall: We're doomed if we do not acknowledge these things happened and work to do something about them. That's his opening premise for why he's doing what he's doing.
Joe: Right.
Niall: So there's the financial crash of 2008. The second one he gives is the enormous waste on Middle East wars. You remember Trump was doing that too when he was campaigning. Bannon gave a figure of $7 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. And then lastly he talked about the one which actually comes first in his chronology. He talks about how the turn of the century decisions were made to advance a process that had already been long underway, the rapid, increasing offshoring of American jobs to China and maybe the east Pacific more generally because all the jobs were going there because the labour was so cheap.
This is where I went 'What is he talking about?' because he went out of his way to describe China as a totalitarian - emphasis on totalitarian - regime implementing East India Company predatory capitalism on whole swathes of the planet. He has spoken in more detail about this elsewhere. He tried to really hammer this home for Trump's administration's foreign policy which would be that China's One Belt/One Road, its investing of the surplus capital it has gotten over these decades of doing all this slave labour to feed the rest of the world, it's China's premise of investing it in building up and lifting up out of poverty one billion Africans, another billion Asians is 'synonymous with the implementation of East India Company's predatory capitalism, i.e., they want to supplant us and do what we did so we've got to stop them'.
It's a weird shtick to have in this whole debate because everything else he talked about was how 'I'm an economic nationalist, I'm just an ordinary working boy from Virginia. It's the elites versus us, the elites screwed us over'. He made a movie about the 2008 financial crisis. There's no holds barred. He could have been up there with Occupy Wall Street or with the lefties saying, 'Big bankers bail themselves out and the political class held a gun to our head and now we want justice. No justice! No peace!' That's Steve Bannon, totally.
Joe: That's lefty, no?
Niall: And he says it a number of times...
Joe: Mr. Breitbart.
Niall: ...on a number of occasions in his Oxford Union speech and then the questions and answers after, "I'm more progressive than most people in this room". And it's true by what he's saying and claiming, he is absolutely. You would put that hard left. Yeah, he's there with Occupy Wall Street and yet he talks rapidly. He's quite like Trump actually the way he won't quite finish a point before he's off free-associating into the next and the next and one jump was seamless but it made no sense in whatever point he was making because he got lost. But he jumps to, "I remember it. I was in the navy. I was in the South China Sea," blah, blah, blah, "China evil, China evil." It's like what are you saying? Between the lines what I'm getting from you is we need to be there to stop China.
Joe: China, China, China.
Niall: But dude! Where does that fit with 'let's sort our own house out first economic nationalism' if you're saying we need to be spending more here in this particular part of the world to save it? There's a cognitive dissonance going on there, at least with that one person.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: Bannon's will won't be the be-all and end-all but he's one to watch because he's going around Europe meeting with opposition and populist parties or now leaders like Salvini or Orbán, trying to create some kind of a unified movement. It's called "The Movement". He's spoken elsewhere in the summer about how George Soros is evil or something but he's bloody awesome. "I want to be like him but we need to do as he did and come up with $32 billions to invest in a counter movement." Okay, again though, what do you do in sorting out people's houses in Europe if you're telling them, "You've all got to be nationalists and protect your nation state"?
Joe: I think a lot of them...
Niall: Shouldn't you be doing that at home?! Why are you doing it over here?
Joe: It's a problem for Americans, especially the American political class and the educated in the Ivy League colleges or whatever...
Niall: Oh no, no, but he's an ordinary working guy.
Joe: But otherwise informed, let's say. He's not an ordinary working boy. He might claim to be an ordinary working boy but you don't start a news corporation and stuff like that if you're an ordinary working boy, except as part of the American dream where anybody can be President. But Americans in general, educated Americans and who have an inclination to involve themselves in...
Niall: Other people's business.
Joe: Well they have an inclination to do that basically because they're Americans. The ones that are interested in world politics and inform themselves and read up and write about world politics, by definition, the bedrock of those people's psyche is manifest destiny 'because we're Americans'.
Niall: To bring the torch of freedom to the four corners.
Joe: Absolutely. Don't ever expect any American, regardless of whether he's left, right, centre, whatever, to ever be able to not approach anything to do with the rest of the world, except from that perspective. It's part of their DNA at this point.
Niall: Okay. {laughter} Well we'll put that in brackets and put it aside on the shelf. What I find interesting is Bannon's identification of those two things in particular, the great recession - you know that's actually called the great recession now.
Joe: Scottie's American and he's always conquering territory in the office and stuff. It's hard to stop him. I see the look in his eye and I know he wants my stuff. {laughter}
Scottie: NO!!
Joe: No? Okay.
Niall: He wants to make it better for you. {laughter}
Joe: Spread freedom and democracy.
Scottie: I just want to make it great again.
Joe: Okay. Well that's okay. Since you put it that way, alright. Go ahead Niall.
Niall: So putting that aside then, the Guardian this week announced a six-month campaign, basically a theme set of articles and analyses and stories and some videos already about populism. Now you can imagine the angle they're going to go with. The Guardian itself identifies as left liberal so populism is it's enemy ideologically. So of course you can imagine the flavour of things that it's going to come out with.
But it's interesting that the one person they've used quite a bit so far as an expert, an academic Dutch guy called Cas Mudde, he's their expert so far and totally agrees with the same basic points that Bannon's making.
Joe: Right.
Niall: He says the same thing as Bannon, that Trump is not the cause here at all, he's a symptom. I didn't know this, but apparently it became normal at some point, but the 2008 incident, crash, heist, to what extent it was actually just structural and agents doing it to people is open, but it's gone down as the great recession.
Joe: Well it didn't have much effect.
Niall: Or did it? Bannon says the solutions that were done to patch it up were temporary and they won't last.
Joe: It's temporary. Well yes, so it didn't happen at the time. Certainly that's possible.
Niall: So we pushed it down the road.
Joe: Right, pushed it down the road and it's going to come back to bite people. But the Guardian has this series on populism and they're, like you said, positting populism as being the opposite of liberalism and leftism, right? That's what you said, right? Which is kind of nonsense based on our analysis of what populism is. It's the ordinary people, especially grassroots, ordinary working class people, ordinary people in any society, attempting to have more influence on the political process.
That's a thing of the left. And like we said, the only way you can spin it into the opposite of lefty liberalism and make it a right-wing thing is if you say, "Well it's usually some demagogue that comes along and exploits grassroots or ordinary people's sentiments against the elite". If people can get past their 'never Trump' business, the 'orange man bad' stuff, lefties, they should or would be able to realize that for 10 or 15 years before Trump any lefty worth his salt was criticizing eight years of Bush and eight years of Obama for their warmongering and essential elitism. How those people can't recognize at least in essence, that Trump came along as a result of that anti-establishment movement of that anti-corrupt elite which is traditionally left wing sentiment in America and around the world, 15 years of the war on terror, 15 years of insecurity, 15 years of misspending, of war crimes and slaughter and refugees and messing up the world by an establishment - particularly in America but also in western Europe - a western political elite that lefties railed against supposedly for all that time.
Well, then in comes Trump and he was voted in as a protest vote by a lot of people against that corrupt elite. So why aren't lefties supporting it? 'Because Trump!' Because of what he looks like, because of what he says and because of what the media, to a large extent, has programmed people to think about him to the point that these people who should know better cannot accept one word that Trump says.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Somebody said to me when I said that it's silly that people just dismiss absolutely everything Trump says because often enough he's actually right, he's not stupid, he makes sense. His delivery isn't very good but what he says now and again at least, is actually accurate. But that doesn't matter. Everything he says is dismissed and the response from somebody on Facebook when I made that point was "Well a broken clock is right twice a day". Yeah, but Trump's not a broken clock and he's not right by accident-that was the implication. He's right because he's not stupid. But for them he's worse than the scum of the earth.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: He deserves no respect whatsoever and it's not possible that anything he can say could have any validity whatsoever. That's a fundamentally irrational and moronic approach to take to anything. If you're actually simply interested, if you're not massively over-identified with something at a personal level, if you're just interested in what's going on, you should be able to give credit where credit is due.
I didn't like George W. Bush because of my anti-imperialist sentiments, but I never did and I would never have picked something he said that I could easily figure out was actually true and criticize it. Why would I do that? I'm actually spreading a lie. Just what? In service to my own personal dislike of Donald Trump because he's orange or because he doesn't look like a proper President or something stupid like that!?
My point here is that the weird thing is that the saviour for the lefties came in the form of Donald Trump. What the lefties wanted after eight years of Bush and eight years of Obama, what the anti-war camp, let's say, wanted after eight years of Bush and eight years of Obama, because they're two warmongers, came in the form of President Trump but unfortunately it wasn't in the right packaging essentially.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: He didn't look right.
Niall: Well they were programmed to reject it, not just by all the media attacking Trump when he announced his nomination, but they were programmed by something deeper. It's hard to say, hard to put your finger on it.
Joe: Well it was the number.
Niall: I think if it had been a better spoken, a better looking...
Joe: Absolutely.
Niall: All better credentials...
Joe: Stands for a lot.
Niall: I don't know.
Joe: It does. For the average person it counts for a lot. Look at Obama - smooth talking, good looking, black guy, dances on the Ellen Show. That passes for so much. He gets so much of a pass because he could dance well on the Ellen Show. That's how fickle people are. He looks good therefore he can do whatever the hell he wants. That's a fundamental truth about human nature. There's loads of psychological studies. Good looking people who are incompetent get jobs far quicker than someone who's skilled who's ugly. Don't underestimate how fickle human beings are and how appearance and superficial stuff influences their behaviour and their decisions and what they think about things.
I said this before in articles that Trump is not liked because he's 'unpresidential', because he doesn't look right, because he doesn't speak right. And of course you throw in the tape recording of him at the beginning, even before he became President where he said that thing about women, grab them by the beep and stuff like that. That turned off a lot of lefty progressives. It's just the whole package. Then they throw in he's a Russian spy and all that kind of stuff and that's the end of it. You're saying you don't think that's the case?
Niall: Well no because the American people voted for Trump.
Joe: No, I'm talking about all the ones that hate him.
Niall: Yeah but they're a minority. They're a minority.
Joe: What kind of minority though?
Niall: Well that's it. I think...
Joe: My point at the beginning of this was that all of the people that are 'never Trump, orange man bad' and there's quite a lot of them and they're quite vociferous and the media has their backing, and a lot of them are on the left, that the problem for them - like I said Trump was actually an answer to a lot of the things that they want, that they have been campaigning for from a leftist point of view, anti-imperialism - he was the answer but simply because it came in the wrong package, that's why they hate him.
Niall: Okay.
Joe: That's why they won't listen to a word he says. That's why, no matter what he says, they won't give any credit to him whatsoever because they're extremely fickle and it's a real irony that people are so superficial that something that would have at least in part addressed their concerns, he's a populist leader, he talks about serving the interests of the ordinary people in America, not just republicans. But of course if he's going to serve the working man, if he's going to increase jobs, if he's going to increase employment and whatever else he says, put people back to work, that's not just the conservative voters that are going to benefit from that, it's lefties as well, lefties that are suffering, lefties that have been complaining about 16 years under Obama and Bush, of salaries decreasing and higher taxes and tax money being spent on warmongering and all that kind of stuff. He was an answer to - not a very good answer, but better than what came before and the best that America could expect at this point - he was a populist answer to the problems of Americans across the board, of the vast majority of Americans.
But this division was deliberately created to stop people recognizing that and the way that it was effected in part at least, was by highlighting that Trump's ugly, he's not very well spoken, he is a bit sexist. So people just went with that focus on the superficial. Of course they threw in the "Russia." "He's a traitor. He's a Russian agent. He's in Russian collusion".
So I see what has happened since Trump's becoming the President and then everything that has happened since, was the advent of real populism in terms of a populist President coming to power in the US and it being subverted by the establishment because they don't like populism. They want to stop populism at all costs which is more say for the people, politicians focusing more on the will of the people and actually fulfilling the will of the people. Not even if they ask for it, but just listen to them and then do stuff that will make them happy, will increase their living standard, will make them feel a bit better. It's not hard to figure out where the problems are in a given society and what people are complaining about.
Niall: Something that's always been claimed in opposition to these populists and their rising is that 'we hold the centre because we're the balance of both interests that swing left and right and we take in the broadest consideration, basically all the people's interests. We take as many of them as we can into mind and that that's why we claim the centre ground.' What's going on then when the so-called extremists of left and right are coming to power on the basis of themselves claiming and beginning to enact the same mix or a similar mix it seems, of left and right, i.e., it's also centre? That's why it has appeal because it appeals to the broadest numbers of people and their interests possible. So is it two centres? Is it one centre being replaced by a new consensus? Do you see what I'm getting at?
Joe: No. Explain it again. Just say the same thing again, mostly, more or less.
Niall: It was even called the Washington neoliberal/neocon consensus internationally between states and also within it, the elites in particular in the west were all of the same mind. Tony Blair comes to power...
Joe: Right.
Niall: ...in 1997. 'It's not Labour. It's not the old crazy socialist but a new centre where a third wave, where we incorporate the mix of the free market. So we claim the centre ground.' And there it is unfolding for a couple of decades and then the centrists seem to give way to people claiming they appeal to the broadest numbers of people, i.e., 'we are the new centre'.
Joe: Who's that?
Niall: Who is it or what is it?
Joe: What's the new centre? What's it represented by?
Niall: Well obviously in Russia where President Putin 24 years in gets 76% of the vote that all international observers agree was a free and fair election. That's an astonishing amalgamation of both left and right interests into one centre. Of course he's castigated by western elites as being far right or sometimes far left. It depends on what day they're talking, but not normal, not in the centre, not where things are safe.
Joe: So populism is the centre.
Niall: Okay. But then what was it before? Was it not the centre? Have we been living in an extremely imbalanced left or right - I'm not sure which - up to this point in time?
Joe: We're stuck on definitions here, but the centre is something that unites all the people, or as much as possible, or appeals to as many people from whatever different sides of the political spectrum as possible, something that it can all agree on. Okay, you can call that centre and that would be what by definition is populism because you're appealing to a larger number of ordinary people and it's ordinary people who have no airs and graces or whatever, including us for example, who would see that that kind of a political policy appeals to them because it serves their interests. That's populism. And it's also nationalism. The way you get the centre, i.e., get as many people as possible in a country to agree with you, is to be nationalistic, especially in a world overtaken by globalism where leaders, particularly in western nations are focused on globalism, are focused on outside their own country, either invading it, bombing it, overthrowing countries for freedom and democracy, all that kind of stuff and a lot of tax dollars.
What was the number Bannon gave? Seven trillion dollars?
Niall: Yeah, on Middle East wars.
Joe: Did they get that back? That's $7 trillion of American taxpayers' money. Did they recover that? Did they at least break even? Or was that $7 trillion taken out of the American economy?
Niall: Not really. It was taken out of the world economy. American taxpayer dollars - ultimately the rest of the world system...
Joe: Feeds it.
Niall: ...paying a tithe, a vassalage to America.
Joe: But somebody's left without a seat when the music stops, no? Eventually.
Niall: Yeah. Up to this point it's been Africa and Asia primarily, South America.
Joe: I don't know what it is, but there's a kind of malaise in a certain sense, that's been growing against the general idea of corrupt politicians. I have a palpable sense of that over the past 15-20 years that more and more people, obviously get more access to it in the age of the internet. You can see more and more people responding in certain ways. But during the age of the internet I've definitely seen more and more people, I think anyway, expressing anti-establishment sentiments.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Becoming more and more distrustful of political leaders, politicians, and more and more distrustful of the media, i.e., the same authority. They're increasingly distrustful of authority. Now whether that's because some people may actually be feeling it in their pocketbook as a result of mismanagement of a country's finances because, let's say, globalism rather than focusing on nationalistic policies they're focusing elsewhere and enriching themselves, which goes with being a corrupt politician.
Or it's for some other reason, a moral reason or something where people are not necessarily suffering economically but they have this antipathy towards politicians and the establishment and the establishment media because they see it being more and more corrupt. They see more and more lies. The lies become more transparent and people just say, "Listen these people are corrupt. Okay, the economy's still going okay for me but from a moral point of view, I have a problem with these leaders." I don't like Tony Blair for example. Look what happened to Tony Blair. It did take a lot. He did a lot obviously, but if you get numbers on that, I'd say there's 80, maybe 90% of the British population hate Tony Blair.
So it can happen very easily and they don't hate him because he trashed the economy or something like that. He's not only hated by the people who lost their jobs because of Tony Blair or something like that. They hate him because of what he did, because of the way he acts and what he says and the way he lies, that he's smarmy. The more the political sphere becomes populated with people like that, the more you're going to have the rise of populism, for one example, which is, as we defined earlier on, people no longer...
Niall: A growing awareness of the distinction between good and bad leadership.
Joe: Right and no longer trust their leadership or are no longer happy to invest their will in that leadership because that leadership for them is immoral, so 'we're not doing that anymore so now we want someone else'. First of all it's "We have to take back power. We have to do something about this. We have to have more say, so we've got to get it." Populism is like today in France I suppose. You'd call these yellow vest protests that have been going on for a couple of weeks. That's probably populism, no? Would you define it as populism? It's certainly the ordinary people trying to assert their will or influence, have a direct influence on the political process.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: So I suppose there's nothing wrong with populism except when they step too far.
Niall: Right. What would Jordan Peterson say about this in the context of his dominance hierarchy and the most intelligent and the most conscientious in general rising to the top and not really owing anything to anyone else but still choosing to do it because they see it's in the best interests of their own personal interests to serve the greater good in some way.
Joe: I don't really think that's the case anymore in western society in a global setting and certainly not in the west. The best certainly don't rise to the top. The problem is that...
Niall: He was saying that statistically they do. The higher IQs are at the top.
Joe: Right, but higher IQ, does that mean that they're better? The problem is that...
Niall: He says they do, that the higher IQ does correlate with higher conscientiousness.
Joe: Right, generally speaking. But the problem is that there's a pyramid there, right?
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: And the top of the pyramid influences everything below, that in a hierarchy you hand down orders. So if you take the top third of the pyramid and say that's the hierarchy, that's the top tier, the top third, the ruling class or industrial class and the vast majority of those people are good people, but if there's a small clique at the top that can exert undue influence on them and on the entire system, then it can go very badly and it can be infected in that way. So many well-meaning people can be infected with an increasingly corrupt ideology or increasingly corrupt practices and can become mainstream.
Unfortunately I don't agree with Jordan Peterson on that. I think it's self-evident that that's not the case, allowing for what I just said which is that you can have a significant number, even a good majority of people at the top, people running the country let's say, who are well meaning, who aren't corrupt and evil but like I said, if there's people above them who have ultimate power, let's say, the final say in what happens and who are consummately self-interested, then that's a problem.
Niall: Yeah. Arguably the American equivalent of Tony Blair as someone who's just reviled consistently and probably by a majority - maybe not as much of - is Hillary Clinton. So the Guardian rolled out quotes apparently from interviews they did with her, the former leader of Italy who lost power to the current Salvini/De Mayo coalition, Matteo Renzi and Tony Blair. So they're getting their opinions on what the rise of populism is, means and what to do about it. You're asking the wrong people!
But imagine what kind of mind you have that there you go too. What's interesting is that their analyses are correct, very good up to a point. So here's Clinton on Brexit. "There's no doubt in my mind that Brexit was largely about immigration." Correct. That's very good.
Joe: No doubt in my mind either.
Niall: Renzi expanding on that - I think they might have been together when they were asked these, I'm not sure: "The problem is not migration itself but the fear of migration".
Joe: Same thing.
Niall: Same thing. But they don't have the context. Either they don't see it themselves - they probably don't because Clinton was also in the news this week for saying that Europe 'needs to' - is an American telling what Europeans need to do again - "Europe needs to curb immigration".
Joe: Right. Coming from...
Niall: To stop the rise of populism.
Joe: Coming from a woman who gloated over the murder of Gaddafi and the destruction of his country...
Niall: As he was actively warning that "if you do this to me, you're going to have a wave of crap".
Joe: So she has the gall. That's the kind of people we're dealing with. Think about that, about someone who's so either deceitful or so absolutely clueless as to the results of her own actions. I'd say she's a liar and she wouldn't know the truth honesty if it came up and bit her on the ass basically she's such a stranger to it. So the disingenuousness and deceitfulness of her to come out and say that, the hypocrisy is just staggering. But there are people like that who it's second nature to. They're the kind of people who go and shoot someone and then go to their funeral and give the eulogy.
Niall: Right. I mentioned Steve Bannon earlier. The media goal is to get people interested and voting for "populist" parties in the European elections in May next year. That's what he says. He's going around campaigning and speaking to leaders of movements and parties in Europe. This week - I think they need to see this. I'm going to ask Scott to put this up. The European parliament itself began political campaigning, not for any one political leader or ideology or party, but rather just to get people out to vote, period.
It reminds me actually of the message of the democrats and the left in the United States during the midterm elections. They weren't so much saying "We need to stop Trump''. The powerful message they were hitting and they were getting celebrities to do it too, was "just get out and vote..." That wasn't fleshed out but "you need to get out and vote". The European parliament's taking the same tack. Can you pull that up?
Scottie: Yeah. Hang on a second.
Niall: Okay, maybe not.
Scottie: Firefox is not cooperating.
Niall: Okay.
Scottie: One second.
Niall: I want you to look at the poster that's already up on some streets in cities across Europe. I don't know exactly what they're supposed to be saying. Maybe we can figure that out between us.
Scottie: Voila!
Niall: Thanks Scottie. European elections 2019. Strasbourg uses Donald Trump to motivate voters. Now the text in French just simply says, "This time I'm registering and I'm going to vote." But that's all the message is at the level of system 2. But that image is going to now be insidious across Europe and on TV and Euro News and as much as they can they're going to push that image on the right you see there. What the hell...
Joe: The European Union is doing that?
Niall: Yes.
Joe: So Trump's behind the star with the European flag or symbol of the European flag on his face. That means 'never Trump'.
Niall: Yes that comes to mind, 'never Trump'. 'Get out and vote to stop a Trump' equivalent?
Joe: 'To stop populism in Europe'. The EU is very much anti-populist because populism equals nationalism equals potentially the destruction of the European Union.
Niall: Or a cessation of disintegration, a halting of it or an ending of it.
Joe: Yeah, the ending of the European Union project. So what was your point about that? Just that it's an issue?
Niall: What is it they're trying to communicate? I think you summed it up there. It's anti-populism because what has been happening of course repeatedly is that the so-called far right or populist parties of the individual member states in Europe have been registering candidates for the European parliamentary elections every four or five years, whenever it takes place, and they've been doing really well. Actually it's the venue where they do well at all. The UK Independence party, Nigel Farage, got his fame and his position because of the success in parliamentary elections. The UKIP won the most seats. It got the largest share of the British vote in the European parliamentary elections the last time around.
Le Pen as well I think when it was Front National also the leading French party represented in the all Europe parliament. I think they're worried that it's going to be a clean sweep where, as soon as they get into the European parliament they join a faction. So the ones who are all the populist nationalist right are all seated together and they are the faction. They come under a subheading, a kind of European group party. So they're worried that this particular faction will become the dominant, I suppose the clear majority inside the European parliament, which by definition is the contradiction that they will have to deal with in some way because the body that doesn't really have much power but it does rubber stamp - and I think it can propose now - some legislation at the EU level, but this body that's supposed to rubber stamp whatever the European Commission comes up with and whatever the ministers agree on when they meet for European summits and the Prime Ministers and so on, is going to be fundamentally antagonistic to it. It would be like having a house and senate in the United States that are completely at odds with each other. Imagine it was a majority democrat - well it is - but imagine that it's a majority democrat and it wants to break up the United States into individual states as nation states while the other houses...
Joe: Want the union.
Niall: Obviously it's fundamentally the other way. It wants to maintain the union. It's only a few steps. You can see where you go to a serious crisis from there. It's happened once before in the United States obviously with the civil war.
I'm not suggesting civil war is on the horizon in Europe, but that's the level of being a standoff. And it's kind of represented in that formal advertising strategy, that tack they're taking. This is the neutral claiming the centre, civilized, above it all, "We don't get down into the fray of the dirt and we're civil and we're certainly not doing anti-Semitic campaigns like that Orbán", etc. etc., constantly criticizing the tactics taken by their opponents. And they just put Trump's face as the key of the campaign and then they stick a European flag over it - rub it in your face, you know. I think it's going to backfire in so many ways. Lately I think they fundamentally underestimate Trump's popularity.
Joe: And the level of...
Niall: In himself and also the sets of deplorables they shunt into the same bracket as Trump across Europe.
Joe: And they're underestimating the level of populism and support for popular leaders and for nationalism in European countries and in Europe in general.
Niall: The Guardian says that one in four people - they did some kind of meta-analysis of recent elections across Europe, national and...
Joe: First of all, I wouldn't trust the results of elections.
Niall: They say one in four.
Joe: I wouldn't trust the results of elections.
Niall: But they're still high.
Joe: Yeah, but I think it's probably twice that or more. I think a majority of people in Europe, when asked the question in a simple way or asked several quite simple questions that could easily determine whether or not they were for lefty, liberal, globalist values or for nationalistic values, a good majority of people would turn out as nationalists.
There's something else going on here I think and it's a bit abstract, but in a general sense I don't think anybody would deny that the level of insecurity or sense of insecurity has been spreading, particularly over the western world but probably over the whole world - and we keep on going back to 911, since the time of 911 for the past 17 to 19 years - the level of insecurity and anxiety, generalized sense among the people that something isn't right, that things aren't going the right way, that things are very chaotic. And that's manifested by this infighting and fractious social discourse and stuff that we see.
And of course there's the hard nuts and bolts aspects of insecurity and chaos in countries where you have these terror attacks being carried out on European and US soil, the school shootings and all of that. All that stuff encourages a sense of insecurity and anxiety among the vast majority of people who are sentient. A natural response to that sense of insecurity that goes way back to tribal times and is in our DNA, is that people close ranks into their identifiable in-group. They shut the door. They circle the wagons. Things aren't right. Things are nervous. There's danger on the horizon.
And people may even perceive other dangers. Throw in the weather and the general climate chaos that's going on, crazy weather happening to people in different countries and killing a lot of people, things are very unsettled and that lends itself to populist sentiments, i.e., nationalist sentiments, i.e., close the doors around our little country, around our ethnic or whatever, social in-group and hunker down because bad things are coming. Bad things are happening and probably worse is coming.
That's a general, vague, mostly unconscious sense that a lot of people have and it's been engendered, that real chaos, that real insecurity and real instability, has been caused by corrupt and irresponsible leadership. So the natural result is, "Screw the leaders. Get then out of there."
Niall: Yeah. Get them out of there. And they're not satisfied with repackaging the same kind of leadership under slightly different...
Joe: No. They're wise to that.
Niall: They're wise and...
Joe: They've seen it before.
Niall: They know it needs to be fundamental although what exactly? Most of the time it's right wing but not always. Obviously, the UK comes to mind, Orbán, although it's not clear that he got most of the voting public behind him. There are other cases too - in Mexico. That's a leftist leader.
Joe: But there can be lefty nationalism.
Niall: Right.
Joe: You can have leftists or actual centrists or mostly leftists who are very much nationalists.
Niall: Oh yeah.
Joe: Well look at Chavez.
Niall: Chavez.
Joe: When he was - according to everybody - super socialist but he was absolutely 100% nationalist. He was nationalism and nationalization of major industries so you can keep the money in the country for the people. That's nationalism. And it's also populism, but in that case it's left wing.
So this left/right business is just thrown in there deliberately to try and divide people from the common ground that most people inhabit which is that, at this point certainly in history, they're all on the same page in terms of "We need to look after our own interests". Who doesn't think that they need to look after their own interests? Who doesn't think that it's natural to say "We've got to get our own house in order"? If there's something physically or structurally wrong with my house, I'm going to do that first before I go and help my neighbour to fix his house.
Niall: Especially as we're repeatedly getting increasingly more floods and they're more extreme. Water keeps coming in. I'm sorry, but I need to fix this thing first.
Joe: Right. And it's been demonized so someone doesn't want that to happen. A certain elite group establishment in western nations really, really don't like that. Because why? Because it posits I suppose a reduction in their own power and their own influence because they want to group as many people as possible under their influence and this atomization of other formerly cohesive blocks like the EU, the breaking of the EU, high level bureaucrats in the EU are probably quite happy with the idea that they have this control over so many countries. They get to influence and have most of the control over many of the policies that occur in 28 different European countries.
And if you suggest to them, "Hey, why don't you take a cut in a bunch of your countries? Maybe you should lose your job altogether because if the European Union breaks up, you EU bureaucrats won't have a job anymore. There will be no 28 countries for you to exert your influence over." Those people would say, "Yeah, don't think I'm going to let you do that. I'm going to try and stop you doing that."
Niall: Steve Bannon is unequivocal in his identification of the source of the problem, if it's to be geographically located. He says it's Brussels. The centre of the globalist project is Brussels.
Joe: Oh yeah?
Niall: That would explain his motivation to see it torn down. He said in his recent Oxford debate "I don't want to tear anything down. I don't want to destroy anything. We're not anarchists for god's sake." He says also that when he goes to meet Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, they are also not interested in tearing down any good work that's been done so far.
Joe: They just want a correction.
Niall: I suppose without using the term they're all talking about regime change.
Joe: In Brussels.
Niall: Yeah. On the one hand they attack it as a globalist project, globalism central I suppose, the primary project of the groups that meet in places like Davos and Bilderberg every year. The European Union is there, the core project, their chief vehicle through which to administer and push and promote "globalism". But at the same time it's not like, "Let's tear it all down". There are of course some fundamentally useful and positive aspects to it that could be used, that are even effective.
The one that the British are having to debate in hindsight and gnashing their teeth over is the simple one that you've raised a couple of times, economically...
Joe: It's very hard to divest yourself.
Niall: You can't divest yourself because it's so damn attractive to have one essential free trade zone that really does - even if it's mismanaged, even if it's...
Joe: Over-weaning.
Niall: ...not distributed correctly or appropriately, even if there are some losers, a lot have gained. There is enough trickle down in all the mismanagement that they've done that Europe as a whole has benefited from being one trade block.
Joe: Yeah, except they would say that it's over-weaning in terms of one thing. It's not just about economics. It's not just a free trade agreement. The USA and Canada or the USA and wherever, the European Union and other countries have free trade agreements. Those other countries don't get to dictate justice system laws or policies or immigration policies or laws in those countries. That's not part of the free trade agreement. A free trade agreement should just be about free trade and that's I think what a lot of the exiteers, people who push for leaving the EU or changing the fundamental nature of the EU, would want. They say, "Listen it can be an economic free trade zone but there's far too much influence from central powers in Brussels on many other aspects of life in those countries that shouldn't be there, that is unnecessary. Why would you have that?"
Niall: Yeah. The battle between the EU and Poland is interesting. It has formally sanctioned Poland. I don't think anything has gone into effect. I think the idea is that they will withhold budget redistribution to Poland as part of those sanctions. But it's been formally sanctioned and the argument that they're having is that the new Polish government in 2015 infringed some basic rules that are, I think explicitly enshrined in the Lisbon treaty, the informal constitution of the whole European Union, namely the people they selected, the incoming government pointed to positions in the judiciary.
That's the basic gist of it but they're saying, "No. We're a rules-based society and you've infringed here, here and here". They gave examples. "Remember the separation of the three executive branches are fundamental things we all agree on, the executive, the judiciary and the legislature." And you're going, okay, if they've been doing that, that's a transgression.
But here's the thing. The previous government, which was actually of Donald Tusk's party - Donald Tusk is now the unelected President of the European Commission - his party, when he was Prime Minister of Poland, did exactly the same thing.
Joe: Campaigned.
Niall: Because that's exactly what everyone does. Donald Trump, the vast part of the political war against Trump at the moment was initially to try and delay as much as possible, his appointments, not just of justices to the Supreme Court and other courts, but also his appointments in his rightful territory at the head of agencies that would answer to the executive.
Joe: The executive branch.
Niall: They're holding him off left, right and centre and they give all these reasons for why but the fundamental transgression he's supposed to have made is a bluff because everyone does that when they come in. That's what you do. The new Polish government was doing exactly as Tusk's before. It's common practice. But suddenly the thing that they say, the fundamental rules that we all follow are suddenly applied for specific incoming governments.
But that's what hits me. Why is it that NOW you're upholding the rule of law and the rules based order when you know full well that the actual practice of politics to this point has been done by horse trading and bartering and bribery? Of course it is! That's how the system works. We all SAY we're following these rules.
Joe: Yeah. Well Tusk obviously joined a different group when he left.
Niall: Right so obviously...
Joe: ...domestic politics and went to the EU.
Niall: Obviously there's a personal investment because he's of the other side in an intra-Polish affair. But there's more to it than that. How do you get the machinery of the European Union to target you like that? There's some transgression, I think, that's not being spoken of.
Joe: He's a populist, no?
Niall: Populist. But what does that mean? The government is following the rules...
Joe: Well look, when you're part of the EU, if you're a member state in the EU you've signed up to the principles on which the EU is based, the written and unwritten principle, which is that 'this is one big group of countries, one big super state and the power of Brussels is the ultimate power and you agree, by joining the EU, to abide by the spirit or the essence of the EU which is we're all one big happy family, no borders, free movement of people, free trade, kind of like it's one big country'.
Anybody who comes out and shows any inclination of saying "You know, I kind of prefer nationalism, closed borders-ish and not really being part of the EU but focusing more on Poland first, let's say, as opposed to the EU first", that's a big no-no. You're going to draw serious fire down on your head. You can talk that way but as soon as you start implementing policies or making moves to make it a reality, they're going to come down on you because you're not a member of the club anymore. You're not playing by the rules of the club anymore. Your membership might be revoked. Of course they don't want to revoke your membership.
That's one of the ironies of the EU. They can't just kick people out because that could start a domino effect. They might be shooting themselves in the foot by just saying, "Okay, you don't want to abide by our rules anymore? Get out!" They don't want to do that because the whole thing could fall apart. So instead what they do is they punish. They give you a good beating to bring you back into line. So you're not allowed to be a populist, nationalist to the extent that populism and nationalism are synonymous. You're not allowed to be that in the EU. That's not what the EU is. The EU is a big communist super state.
Niall: Communist.
Joe: Yeah. "We're all together. We're all living together in a big commune and everybody has to eat the lentils." {laughter} "You have to eat the lentils and whatever else commune people eat."
But just a word on Brexit. A formality of the signing of the document today so May's all happy. Well she shouldn't be happy. She's not actually happy. They just went through the formality of signing her Brexit agreement so that the UK is going to effectively leave the EU but not really. Most of the EU will remain the same based on the current disagreement. The UK membership in the EU won't change. They won't really leave and their relationship with the EU won't change very much especially since it more or less has this idea of a back stop or a prevention of there ever being a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. No hard border there, which means that effectively Northern Ireland remains within the European Union which means that the rest of the UK remains in the European Union because that would just be an unworkable situation where you have one part of a country in the EU and the rest of it isn't. There's no way that's going to happen but that's on paper basically.
So May's deal is just a sop and people are complaining about it, are right to complain about it because to the extent that it was a legitimate thing to do, to try and have a Brexit, their complaints are legitimate that it's not Brexit at all. But then you have to recognize the fact that Brexit was never really possible. It was never going to happen and there was no political will at all for Brexit and they've spent the past few years trying to undo that vote effectively, or manipulate or fool the population to come up with some kind of agreement that looks like Brexit that's enough to fool the population, throw them a few concessions and we'll just stay in the EU and hopefully this will all be over in the morning and we'll forget about it. Hopefully by next year it'll all be done.
That's what they've been trying to do for the past year. But now it's become more about internal political party politics and you have a group of coup plotters essentially, who are planning to, when May takes this agreement to parliament that has to approve it, that looks like at this point it'll be rejected by a majority of people on both sides, Labour and from all parties will reject it including May's own party. A lot of Mayers will reject it and when that happens she'll be booted.
Niall: When is that coming up? Soon?
Joe: Early December. In a week or two. So right now there's a battle going on with May's government trying to strategize. They have a war room going and stuff, planning how they're going to convince as many MPs as possible to vote for it, to change their minds, including offering people peerages, i.e., lifetime peerages in the House of Lords where they get to lie there and drool on their shirts and get paid large amounts of money for doing so. It's a cushy job.
Niall: Do they wear the wigs?
Joe: Some people can wear a wig in the house of lords but most of them have wigs anyway. {laughter} So that's what she's doing. She's apparently offering peerages to people to try and convince them to vote for her. But it probably won't happen anyway and then she'll be done.
Niall: What was this about organizing a financial crash?
Joe: Apparently one of the things, was that they were going to manufacture in some way or other appearance of a crash or scaremonger. I don't know how they were going to do it. Obviously you're talking about the chancellor of the exchequer and maybe the head of the Bank of England. There's probably different people there who you could get in contact with to put out notices or whatever that...
Niall: There's been a run on the pound and banks are drying up or something.
Joe: That in the event that parliament rejects her deal suddenly it'll be scaremongering, a controlled scaremongering if you know what I mean, of the market and that the economy's on the verge of collapse 'because you all voted against my deal. Now, do you want to vote again and think hard about it this time?' That was apparently part of their plan. So they're really desperate. These are just people who want to stay in power. It's May who wants to remain Prime Minister and her ministers who want to remain ministers. That's all they're doing this for.
And the ones who want to boot her out have no interest in Brexit either, really. They're just vying for political power.
Niall: Assuming that the financial crash thing won't happen because it's been leaked, it might have been why it was done to sabotage, but assuming that the next sequence is, "Okay, the "Brexit" deal goes to parliament, they vote on it, the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) have already declared they would not support it.
Joe: Right.
Niall: So right there that's the majority even if all of the Tory party got behind May, they won't anyway so it's not going to pass. Then there's a leadership challenge. She's probably booted. There's a new leader of the conservative party.
Joe: Boris Johnson.
Niall: And in comes an interim Prime Minister...
Joe: Boris Johnson.
Niall: ...until the next elections. So Boris Johnson.
Joe: And then he'll make a new tremendous deal, an even better tremendous deal with the EU. He'll drive a hard bargain basically.
Niall: With Trump's help.
Joe: With his floppy head, with Trump's help and he'll get an even better deal and it'll just be another sop as well and ultimately the whole thing is a joke.
Niall: It might probably lead to new elections.
Joe: That's the other possibility, which is the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn are very interested in happening more so than May being booted or anything like that. They want the situation to provoke a call for a general election.
Niall: Okay, let's follow that on. Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. What happens next?
Joe: He probably has another opening, maybe, maybe not, depending on what the situation is at that point in time, if people have had enough of it, if they get a sense that maybe people have swung back to staying in the EU. But if not, I think Corbyn would just end up in exactly the same position because I think every leader, no matter who comes to power in the UK realizes that probably there's still a majority who would vote for Brexit and want Brexit. They have to deliver Brexit of some description. So he would then make his attempt to fob off some dodgy...
Niall: Brexit lite.
Joe: "We're 'Brexiting" on the people and hopefully eventually people would just get bored of the whole thing and say, "Okay, just give me the damn agreement. I'll sign it. Just shut up about Brexit." Really, it's insignificant. People ascribe all sorts of things to Brexit, especially the Little Englanders, bring independence to the UK, especially on the right wing, like Paul Joseph Watson, "This is the UK taking back its sovereignty, making England great again, striking a blow against the globalists" and they think that's what's going to happen if they can get a real Brexit type thing. But that's just nonsense because that's now how it works. The people in power in the UK are of the same mindset as the people in power in the EU essentially. You're talking about "globalists'' there who are fundamentally corrupt leaders and probably psychopaths of some description and ultimately this comes down to whether or not leaders have the interests of the ordinary people at heart or not.
Unfortunately in this day and age in the western world, most of the leaders who have all of the real and significant power do not have the best interests of the people at heart and that's why people are unhappy.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: I think we better wrap it up there folks. We're running past time. That was populism explained, more or less among other things. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you liked it please like and if you like our channel please subscribe so you can get notified about new videos. We'll be back next week with another show on another topic. So until then, have a good evening.
Niall: Have a good evening. Thanks for listening.
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