Marginal Christianity

Liberalism needs nothing less than a great rebalancing if it is to regain its intellectual and political vitality Jun 12th 2018 by BAGEHOT BREXIT is such an all-consuming process for the British—at once a drama, a muddle and a mess—that it is easy to forget that it is part of something bigger: a crisis of liberalism in the west. A growing number of countries have had their own equivalents of Brexit: Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; the election of a populist government in Italy; the Catalan revolt in Spain; the rise of populist authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland and, to some extent, India; the simmering rage against what Viktor Orban calls “liberal blah blah” in the intellectual dark-web. The list will be a lot longer by the time Brexit has been completed. It’s worth taking a break from the ins-and-outs of Brexit to look at the bigger picture, partly because the bigger picture helps us to understand Brexit better (NB...

The Rise of the Anti-Revolution All around this troubled globe, we’re seeing the rise of a phenomenon as strange as an ice-storm in a desert: the regressive revolution. We’re used, you and I in the West, and especially in the US, where our creation myth glorifies one triumphantly, to seeing revolutions as the wheel of human progress only ever turning forwards. But revolutions, more precisely understood, can go either way: the wheel can move backwards, too. Backwards revolutions, luckily, are rarer in the sweep of human history, and if they weren’t, then you and I would probably be stuck in caves, bonded to our plows. Hence, we’ve come to only see revolution as only positive things which enshrine democracy, rights, equality, and so on   —   like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, etcetera. But regressive revolutions happen too, which are often later given names like fascism, authoritarianism, and tyranny   —   though, in the heat of the moment, the emergence...

Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism . In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality. Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range...

Traditional political and economic models have been challenged by their inability to predict the financial crisis and their failure to bring about a return to prosperity. In an interview with EUROPP’s Managing Editor Stuart Brown,  Phillip Blond   discusses the collapse of left-wing and right-wing ideologies, the new majorities that may take their place, and why despite the EU’s failings, becoming the leading power in Europe still offers Britain its best route to leading events on the world stage. You’ve previously stated that the financial crisis has illustrated the bankruptcy of left-wing and right-wing political ideologies. Why have traditional ideologies failed? I think it’s very clear that we’re looking at a complete collapse of standard left and right ideologies across many countries in Europe. We’re in a situation where the left, in order to achieve its end – chiefly greater equity and a stake for the poor in society – only has the state as its means of delivery. B...

Elizabeth Farrelly I knew an unemployed artist who found work with a registered training organisation. Not teaching art. Teaching forklift drivers. "You ever drive a forklift?" I asked in surprise. He said no, unnecessary. He'd done a short course (not in forklift driving). He'd ticked the VET boxes for the TAE certificate from the RTO. All good. To me it made no sense, even sans the alphabet soup. Still doesn't. But this is what we have now instead of an education system: a market. Caveat emptor. It has to end. Neoliberalism was always based on a fundamental failure of self-knowledge. Now surely it has run its course. For decades, belief in The Market as divine presence – guaranteeing fairness and quality and providing a universal template for everything from museums to democracy to prisons – has been sewn like a nasty neoliberal pellet under our social skin. Gradually, as it released its low-dose toxicity into our bloodstream, we've depriv...

                                        George Monbiot Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . But we resp...

The Reason Why We Should be Depressed About Bernie Sanders' Success by Charles Mudede • Feb 9, 2016 at 11:35 am   The key and devastating idea in Thomas Piketty's masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century , an idea that many missed or failed to appreciate, is that there is no law-like link between democracy and capitalism. As he points out at the beginning of the book, there was after the Second World War great belief in the Kuznets Curve . The economist Simon Kuznets devised this hypothesis, which was eagerly accepted by those on the right and the left of his time (the 1950s). By using tax records, he saw a movement in the history of capitalism that began with things being very unequal and brutal for the poor to, step by step, things being more equal and democratic. It was therefore a law of capitalism that, as it accumulated more wealth, more of this wealth was distributed downward. But what did Piketty show? This curve was not a law but the result of a h...

by Benjamin Studebaker Lately the internet has become full of arguments about the merits and demerits of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been discussing and pondering all the various views about this, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that most of the people engaging in this debate don’t really understand what is at stake in the democratic primary. This is in part because many Americans don’t really understand the history of American left wing politics and don’t think about policy issues in a holistic, structural way. So in this post, I want to really dig into what the difference is between Bernie and Hillary and why that difference is extremely important. We have a tendency in American politics to focus too much on individuals and personal narratives, especially in presidential campaigns. Who’s in touch with ordinary people? Who is experienced? Who is a nice person? Who connects better with different identity groups? Who would you like to h...

Oprah is appealing because her stories hide the role of political, economic and social structures in our lives. They make the American dream seem attainable Nicole Aschoff Saturday 9 May 2015 08.30 EDT Last modified on Saturday 9 May 2015 16.50 EDT In Oprah Winfrey lore, one particular story is repeated over and over. When Oprah was 17, she won the Miss Fire Prevention Contest in Nashville, Tennessee. Until that year every winner had had a mane of red hair, but Oprah would prove to be a game changer. The contest was the first of many successes for Oprah. She has won numerous Emmys, has been nominated for an Oscar, and appears on lists like Time’s 100 Most Influential People. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She founded the Oprah Book Club, which is often credited with reviving Americans’ interest in reading. Her generosity and philanthropic spirit are legendary. Oprah has legions of obsessive, devoted fans who write her letters and...

By Creston Davis, Founder & Director of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) We’re all familiar with one of the founding stories of western literature about the decade long siege on the city of Troy by the Greeks.  This story is penned in Homor’s  Odyssey  and later in the  Aenied of Virgil and tells the tale of ultimate subterfuge.  The plan was based on the deception of a false gift, the Wooden Horse given to Troy as a Victory Trophy.  The Trojans were immediately taken, and as the Greeks sailed away from their abandoned positions, they celebrated even as they moved Greek troops into their secure city unawares.  Once everyone relaxed and got intoxicated from celebrating, the Greek troops popped out of the horse and took the city down. When the 1960s revolution directly threatened to take over the modes of production, the capitalist elites teamed up with economic professors (many from the University of Chicago) and devised a p...

  An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities             Paul Verhaeghe theguardian.com , Monday 29 September 2014 04.00 EDT                    'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have take...