[Occupymendocino] Fwd: Tomgram: John Feffer, The Rising Tide of the Populist Right

Wed May 15 11:47:12 PDT 2019

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From: TomDispatch <tomdispatch at nationinstitute.org>
Date: Mon, May 13, 2019 at 6:37 AM
Subject: Tomgram: John Feffer, The Rising Tide of the Populist Right
To: <BLACKDANTHEMAN100 at gmail.com>

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May 13, 2019
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Rising Tide of the Populist Right
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=eda628eead&e=0190770d14>

[*Note for TomDispatch Readers:* *Just a reminder: for a donation to this
website of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can still get a
signed, personalized copy of Beverly Gologorsky’s riveting new Dispatch
novel, *Every Body Has a Story
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=b7c5f91ab0&e=0190770d14>*.
(Check out her recent
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=df1c0e7e8f&e=0190770d14>*
TD
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=66c563d62f&e=0190770d14>*
post
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=692b951325&e=0190770d14>**
on the nightmare of health care in this country for my original offer,
which will only last a few more days.) In addition, note that both of John
Feffer’s dystopian novels, *Splinterlands
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=ecc9e98a75&e=0190770d14>*
and *Frostlands
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=a0290bf507&e=0190770d14>*,
are similarly available. Check out our **donation page*
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for the details. Tom*]

The man who is the most unpredictable American president of all time lives
in what is, if you stop to think about it, a remarkably predictable world.
Each of his seemingly strange and unexpected acts, tweets
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=17863a14a3&e=0190770d14>,
bizarre nominations
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=5bedb1fcdf&e=0190770d14>,
lies and misleading claims
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=7b40e95996&e=0190770d14>,
rallies, gestures (or those of his circle of fawning officials, advisers,
and family members) is promptly seized upon by a media desperate for
eyeballs.  All those cable news talking heads, all those reporters assigned
to a presidency in numbers never before seen
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=f75d667c9c&e=0190770d14>
run with whatever he does as if there were neither a yesterday nor a
tomorrow, as if there were nothing in the world but him and his cronies
(and those who oppose him). The Mueller report, Attorney General William
Barr's testimony before the Senate, his unwillingness to testify
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=a9d9abe875&e=0190770d14>
before the House, the latest phone conversation
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=fbe6be4365&e=0190770d14>
with Vladimir Putin or a Trump lawsuit
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=4e30bc3970&e=0190770d14>,
or... well, you name it. Though he calls the media the “enemy of the people
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=e6ab61efd5&e=0190770d14>,”
there’s never been anything in our history like its collusion with him. In
pure attention terms, can there be any doubt that the media he loves to
denounce is his for the asking or that it's creating a bizarre cult of
personality
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=8243efac2c&e=0190770d14>
around him? In that sense, it’s everything he ever wanted and it’s now
ineradicably fused to him and only him. Each of his acts plays out in a
surging torrent of publicity, reportage, and a blizzard of tweets and
social media attention.  It's no longer the news as we once knew it, but a
kind of continuous news seizure, a spasm of nothing but him.

It matters not at all that you could essentially have guessed what William
Barr was going to say in that Senate hearing or that the president’s
strange acts are, in some fashion, curiously predictable and repetitive or
that so much about the world he looms over remains similarly predictable.
Even his popularity in the polls varies remarkably little
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=573ac24653&e=0190770d14>,
month by month, year by year, with his base eternally loyal and so many
others outraged.

In such a world, always in your face, always in close-up -- and what a
close-up that face of his is (reminding me, at least, of every belligerent
father of the 1950s I ever knew!) -- it’s hard to get perspective on much
of anything.  That's why John Feffer, author most recently of the dystopian
novel *Frostlands
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=cad3dd7538&e=0190770d14>*,
is such a useful figure, whether in his weekly columns
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=99482f32e6&e=0190770d14>
at *Foreign Policy in Focus* or, as today, at *TomDispatch*
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=5f11ff82a8&e=0190770d14>.
He reminds us regularly that, whatever the evidence of our daily media
lives, there’s still a world out there, a planet distinctly in distress
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=1bc10c32b0&e=0190770d14>
that needs thought and attention. *Tom*

*The Threat of Political Climate Change*
*Countering the Bannon Archipelago*
By John Feffer
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=40cf3b3809&e=0190770d14>

In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the
“pink tide” of progressivism has all but disappeared
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=024b3e010f&e=0190770d14>
from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent
exception of Spain
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=fb75ccf2ce&e=0190770d14>,
the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia,
socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain
corruption. And forget about the Middle East.

In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left
commands only a few disconnected islands -- Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand,
South Korea, Spain, Uruguay. In so many other places, increasingly
illiberal leaders are in charge. Add up the numbers and significantly more
than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of
right-wing populist or authoritarian rule, courtesy of Donald Trump in the
United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in
China, among others.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.
<https://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=d0b29952b1&e=0190770d14>

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