Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 1, 2018 at 00:22:09 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)
> By Thomas L. Friedman
> Jun 26 2018’
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/opinion/political-parties-climate.html>
>
> If you haven’t already noticed, let me be the first on your block to point it out: The big mainstream political 
> parties across the industrialized world are all blowing up at once. It’s quite extraordinary.
>
> The U.S. Republican Party has blown up in all but name, going overnight from an internationalist, free-trade, 
> deficit-hawk party to a protectionist, anti-immigrant, deficit-dove party — all to accommodate the instincts of 
> Donald Trump and his base.
>
> As the former House Speaker John Boehner noted: “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican 
> Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.” Actually, it’s dead, but it’s not alone in the cemetery.
>
> Italy’s last election ended with its mainstream center-left getting crushed, bringing to power instead a coalition of 
> far-left, far-right populists, whose focus ranges from guaranteeing minimum income for Italy’s 11 percent unemployed 
> to rebuffing immigrants and the European Union.
>
> Britain’s Labour Party has gone from center-left to quasi-Marxist. And the Brexit-loving Tories, having pushed 
> Britain to exit the E.U. without any plan, are now divided and paralyzed over how to implement the economic suicide 
> they’ve promised voters.
>
> The U.S. Democrats are fractured between a Bernie Sanders quasi-socialist wing and a center-left wing, but are glued 
> together for now — thank goodness — by the overriding need to defeat Trump. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took four 
> months to form a barely coherent governing coalition, after her ruling party got hammered in the last election — and 
> that fragile coalition may soon implode over immigration tensions. And French President Emmanuel Macron leads a 
> centrist party that did not exist three years ago.
>
> As Quartz noted, the French Socialist Party “went from running the country to receiving just 6 percent of the vote in 
> the first round of presidential elections last year.” In the Netherlands, the Labor Party has been decimated, going 
> from 25 percent of the vote in 2012, and governing in a coalition, to just 6 percent in last year’s general election.
>
> What’s going on? My short answer: climate change — but not just the one you think. We’re actually going through three 
> climate changes at once, and together they are reshaping the ecosystems of work, learning, geopolitics, ethics and 
> community in ways that parties built on our old left-right binary choices can no longer easily contain.
>
> How so? We’re going through a change in the climate of the climate: We’re going from later to now. When I was growing 
> up in Minnesota, later was when I could clean that lake, save that forest or rescue that endangered owl. Today later 
> is officially over. Later will now be too late, so whatever you’re going to save, save it now. That’s a climate 
> change.
>
> We’re going through a change in the climate of globalization: We’re going from an interconnected world to an 
> interdependent world. In an interdependent world your friends can kill you faster than your enemies. If banks in 
> Greece or Italy — both NATO allies — go under tonight, your retirement fund will feel it. And in an interdependent 
> world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China takes six more islands in the 
> South China Sea tonight, you won’t lose sleep; if China loses 6 percent growth tonight, you could lose your job.
>
> Lastly, we’re going through a change in the climate of technology. Machines are acquiring most of the unique 
> attributes of humans — particularly the ability to learn, analyze, reason, maneuver and drive on their own.
>
> From 1960 to 2000, Quartz reported, U.S. manufacturing employment stayed roughly steady at around 17.5 million jobs. 
> But between 2000 and 2010, thanks largely to digitization and automation, “manufacturing employment plummeted by more 
> than a third,” which was “worse than any decade in U.S. manufacturing history.” And we’ve digitized only about 20 
> percent of the economy, meaning there’s tremendous technological climate change yet ahead.
>
> These climate changes are reshaping the ecosystem of work — wiping out huge numbers of middle-skilled jobs — and this 
> is reshaping the ecosystem of learning, making lifelong learning the new baseline for advancement.
>
> These three climate changes are also reshaping geopolitics. They are like a hurricane that is blowing apart weak 
> nations that were O.K. in the Cold War — when superpowers would shower them with foreign aid and arms, when China 
> could not compete with them for low-skilled work and when climate change, deforestation and population explosions had 
> not wiped out vast amounts of their small-scale agriculture.
>
> [snip]
>
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