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The Need for a New Political Vocabulary
Hudson, Michael http://michael-hudson.com/2024/07/the-need-for-a-new-political-vocabulary/
Date Written: 06/07/2024 Year Published: 2024 Resource Type: Article
Political differences between Europes centrist parties are marginal, all supporting neoliberal cutbacks in social spending in favor of rearmament, fiscal stringency and the deindustrialization that support of U.S.-NATO policy entails. The word centrist means not advocating any change in the economys neoliberalism. Hyphenated-centrist parties are committed to maintaining the pro-U.S. post-2022 status quo.
That means letting U.S. leaders control European politics via NATO and the European Commission, Europes counterpart to Americas Deep State. This passivity is putting its economies onto a war footing, with inflation, trade dependence on the United States and European deficits resulting from U.S.-sponsored trade and financial sanctions against Russia and China.
Abstract: -
Excerpt:
Voters in France, Germany and Italy are turning away from this blind alley. Every incumbent centrist party has recently lost and their defeated leaders all had similar pro-U.S. neoliberal policies. As Steve Keen describes the centrist political game: "The Party in power runs Neoliberal policies; it loses the next election to rivals who, when they get in power, also run neoliberal policies. They then lose, and the cycle repeats." European elections, like this November's one in the United States, are largely a protest vote with voters having nowhere else to go except to vote for the populist nationalist parties promising to smash this status quo. This is continental Europes counterpart to Britains Brexit vote.
The AfD in Germany, Marine le Pens National Rally in France and Georgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy are depicted as smashing and breaking the economy by being nationalist instead of conforming to the NATO/EU Commission, and specifically by opposing the war in Ukraine and European isolation from Russia. That stance is why voters are supporting them. We are seeing a popular rejection of the status quo. The centrist parties call all nationalist opposition neo-fascist, just as in England the media describe both the Tories and Labour as centrists but Nigel Farage as a far right populist.
The former left parties have joined the centrists, becoming pro-U.S. neoliberals. There is no counterpart on the old left to the new nationalist parties, except for Sara Wagenknechts party in East Germany. The "left" no longer exists in the way that it did when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Todays Social Democratic and Labor parties are neither socialist nor pro-labor, but pro-austerity. The British Labour Party and German Social Democrats are no longer even anti-war, but support the wars against Russia and Palestinians.
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