Must read: "There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding."

Monbiot is onto something important here, although his notion of "rewilding" -- devolution from top-down government -- begs a question: How do local and regional groupings wrest this power away from bigger government, or by extension, biggest capital?

Moreover, as we've seen in New Albany, it still doesn't mean we'll get devolution to the neighborhood level. You really don't think Jeff and Adam are in favor of THAT, do you?

Click through and read the entire essay. There's no paywall at The Guardian.

There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

This form of radical trust devolves power away from top-down government, often with some very unexpected results

You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. You can blame the Indian challengers for Narendra Modi, the Brazilian opposition for Jair Bolsonaro, and left and centre parties in Australia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Turkey for similar electoral disasters. Or you could recognise that what we are witnessing is a global phenomenon.

Yes, there were individual failings in all these cases, though the failings were very different: polar opposites in the cases of Corbyn and Clinton. But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.

In these nations, people you wouldn’t trust to post a letter for you have been elected to the highest office. There, as widely predicted, they behave like a gang of vandals given the keys to an art gallery, “improving” the great works in their care with spray cans, box cutters and lump hammers. In the midst of global emergencies, they rip down environmental protections and climate agreements, and trash the regulations that constrain capital and defend the poor. They wage war on the institutions that are supposed to restrain their powers while, in some cases, committing extravagant and deliberate outrages against the rule of law. They use impunity as a political weapon, revelling in their ability to survive daily scandals, any one of which would destroy a normal politician.

Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.

If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.

In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics.

Don’t expect Johnson’s government, or Trump’s, to inoculate people against their own lies. But this need not be a government initiative ...

Long read, necessary read: "Systemic, collaborative localization is ultimately the most effective antidote to authoritarianism."

James Dean Bradfield sings Nicky Wire's lyrics in the opening track of Resistance is Futile, the Manics' new album: "There is no theory of everything," or in other words, no comprehensive equation to describe the entire universe.

(I've just now realized The Theory of Everything is the title of a Stephen Hawking biopic; as noted previously, I'm good for a handful of movies a year at best.)

I think Nicky's just being poetic. For my money, this article is about as close as we'll get to a theory of everything as it pertains to globalization. It's long, it's deadly, and we mustn't forget to follow the money.

Localization: A Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge (Transnational Institute via Common Dreams)

In order to see how corporate deregulation has led to a breakdown of democracy, to increasing fundamentalism and violence, and to the rise of far-right political leaders, it is vitally important that we see the broader connections that mainstream analyses generally ignore.

For those who care about peace, equality and the future of the planet, the global political swing to the right over the past few years is deeply worrying. It has us asking ourselves, how did this happen? How did populism turn into such a divisive and destructive force? How did authoritarianism take over the political scene once again?

From my 40 years of experience working in both industrialized and land-based cultures, I believe the primary reason is globalization. When I say globalization, I mean the global economic system in which most of us now live – a system driven by continual corporate deregulation and shaped by neoliberal, capitalist ideologies. But globalization goes deeper than politics and the economy. It has profoundly personal impacts.

Under globalization, competition has increased dramatically, job security has become a thing of the past, and most people find it increasingly difficult to earn a livable wage. At the same time, identity is under threat as cultural diversity is replaced by a consumer monoculture worldwide. Under these conditions it’s not surprising that people become increasingly insecure. As advertisers know from nearly a century of experience, insecurity leaves people easier to exploit. But people today are targeted by more than just marketing campaigns for deodorants and tooth polish: insecurity leaves them highly vulnerable to propaganda that encourages them to blame the cultural “other” for their plight ...

Take time to consider Heinberg's "Fight of the Century: Localization in a Globalized World."

This excerpt from Richard Heinberg's latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels is heavy reading, but necessary.

It isn't possible to summarize briefly, so I'll extract three chunks. The first paragraph aptly sets the scene.

Fight of the Century: Localization in a Globalized World, by Richard Heinberg (Common Dreams)

As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, many countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries—while leaving the majority of their people to languish in “austerity.” This has resulted in a series of uprisings, taking a variety of forms in different nations. Such conditions and responses will lead, sooner or later, to social as well as economic upheaval—and a collapse of the support infrastructure on which billions depend for their very survival.

As such, the emphasis returns to local strategies.

Thinking in terms of simplification, contraction, and decentralization is more accurate and helpful, and probably less scary, than contemplating collapse. It also opens avenues for foreseeing, reshaping, and even harnessing inevitable social processes so as to minimize hardship and maximize possible benefits.

I'm especially struck by Heinberg's description of popular uprisings and their likelihood. It is a them only recently considered by local writer Erica Rucker in LEO Weekly: America is burning: 
indignation and the end of civility.

A global popular uprising is the predictable result of governments’ cuts in social services, their efforts to shield wealthy investors from consequences of their own greed, and rising food and fuel prices. In recent years, recurring protests have erupted in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. The long-range aims of protesters are in many cases unformulated or unarticulated, but the immediate reasons for the protests are not hard to discern. As food and fuel prices squeeze, poor people naturally feel the pinch first. When the poor are still able to get by, they are often reluctant to risk assembling in the street to oppose corrupt, entrenched regimes. When they can no longer make ends meet, the risks of protest seem less significant—there is nothing to lose; life is intolerable anyway. Widespread protest opens the opportunity for needed political and economic reforms, but it also leads to the prospect of bloody crackdowns and reduced social and political stability.

"When the poor are still able to get by" reminds me of another bit of timeless wisdom.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

You may recognize it. That's Thomas Jefferson.

(Thanks to Jeff G for the link)