Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is baffled. /1 https://t.co/77e1AU5zlY

It says this is just the rising up of millions of people who have felt ignored by traditional politics. Who are doing it tough. They’re trending ‘Right’. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The LCR lens is hopelessly disconnected from reality. /2

All shifts in human life are led. And then followed. We have the causation backwards. Led by ‘elites’, followed by everybody else. Elites spinning narratives about how they’re here to rescue people. But really just wanting to promote their position in the status quo. /3

Or to supplant that status quo entirely, with a new one. An absolute favourite for rival elites is to claim to be speaking for ‘the people’, whom they say are being screwed by the existing status quo. Everyone on the LCR spectrum claims to be doing that same thing. /4

All claim to be fighting for ‘the people’, an empty and non-existent thing, as if populations of millions have some sort of active group mind, but are for some reason incapable of speech. @Peter_Turchin’s work identifies this elite rivalry that drives all change. /5

He combines it with an ‘immiseration’ of the wider population as key ingredients for sparking change. On the latter I think he’s maybe on the wrong track. He’s adopting the same LCR idea that the people is a thing, and only mobilises when being screwed. /6

It’s very standard LCR mythology, that economics is the dominant existential framework for people’s lives. “It’s the economy, stupid”. That guff. Marry it to LCR thinking, and you have modern politics. /7

Now being swept away with increasing and alarming speed by populist movements. Plenty who sign onto these movements are doing OK, economically. Money doesn’t run societies. Information doesn’t either. Societies run on status. /8

Progressives try to help the immiserated, and are rarely rewarded for it. Have a look at Albo this week facing a barrage of heat from the immiserated young people he was trying to help. Look at that word. ‘Aspiration’. Conservatives trot it out obsessively. /9 https://t.co/I9Kw1rfuEd

They know in the way progressives don’t that status runs societies. That’s what people aspire to. Higher status, or having any status at all. Not money. Research actually shows people will choose status, if they have to pick between that, and money. /10

Make a person a ‘team leader’ at work, and you neuter their dissatisfaction at being poorly paid. You can even make a team leader do a manager’s work, for no extra money. We need to go to people like Girard, and Tarde, and Storr, to understand what’s happening to us. /11

The rise of Trump-like movements isn’t some heroic coming to the rescue of the downtrodden. They’d love you to think that, it’s the spin most elite rivals use. These populists are already elite. They’re fighting other members of that elite. Turchin is spot on there. /12

The followers they accumulate though aren’t just looking for a better life, economically. Again many of them are already doing fine. They want status. They’re imitating these elite rivals, in their own imitative rivalry (Girard). /13

Societies have lost their status hierarchies. The great ‘democratic’ experiment of making everybody equal status is a train wreck, when you understand status. An incendiary accelerant of status rivalry. /14

The more similar people become, the more they imitate one another, the more ‘social’ they become, the more rivalry will intensify, and the more violent societies will become. Imitative rivalry. People fighting to differentiate themselves from others, in status. /15

That’s why ‘aspiration’ works, for conservatives, representing the most elite of a current elite. Promising millions that they too can join them, if they ‘aspire’ to that position. Of course it’s bullshit, that transition never happens. But they know their target. /16

The global wave of populism we see isn’t a global rising up of the immiserated, fired up by elites battling one another for supremacy. That latter rivalry is what’s leading the shift, but its motive force is the absence of a strong centralised status hierarchy . /17

Monarchies and religions were those hierarchies, that controlled status rivalry. Both by making the top of those hierarchies transcendent, in the sense that none of us can really be kings, or gods. That one step sucks the oxygen out of widespread status rivalries. /18

As scholars are now saying, time to step outside the Westphalian analytical bubble, which can only see everything through LCR-State-economic categories. What we’re seeing is the rebirth of royalism. Easily humanity’s most dominant social form. /19 https://t.co/ou4eUZgk2b

And as Girard said, what eventually enabled Western civilisation at least was the use of Christian belief to relocate the scapegoat of status rivalry into the divine itself. He found that impossibly unlikely, that humans would voluntarily sacrifice status in this way. /20 https://t.co/NUU25J3DqW

It converted him to a believer, in some form of supernatural intervention in human affairs. With no pre-existing ‘religious’ skin in the game. But that’s for another day. /end