We haven’t done one of these for a while, not least because I haven’t been blogging enough. Here are some ideas
The Populist Papers: this will probably be either AFOE or maybe Politico Europe, and it’s an effort to define what the key traits of populism (European meaning, negative LaFollette) are. My thinking is that it’s mostly a technique of politics, and that’s what’s interesting about it.
Google Editor: basically, if you want Google to do something about the Twitter-nazis, be careful what you ask for as turning a bunch of big Californian corporations into admitted rather than veiled editorial authorities might have some unintended consequences.
Something about the French socialists and how they were the real model for Blairism, New Democrats etc. Troll potential considered gnarly but I think it’s important it was them who decided that the “choix de’l Europe” was also the “tournant de la rigeur”, not once but four times by my count.
Follow up on neo-Edwardians and what the fuck to do about it.
So anyway, for my next trick I’ll need a blogosphere. Step right up!
A couple of years ago I got two books about the Tea Party & one about the New Party to review, and turned it into a review-essay called “Does populism exist?”; I can let you have the gist if you haven’t got access. I focused on the anti-establishment/fearless political outsider angle & argued that the successful populists are the ones with ‘insider’ allies and connections; true political outsiders, however anti-establishment and fearless, are likely to crash and burn, what with being outsiders and everything.
That does sound interesting. My original experience of this was the FPO – for sure they were weird, but the system had kind of recognised them all the way back to when they started as a lobby for old Nazis.
On populism, might be interesting to examine the slow, steady convergence of the agendas of the Sun & the Mail over the last 10 years or so, as they quite well represent the weird coalition that is English populism at the moment.
I see your sidebar comment about the media literacy thing. Do you mean you think the explanation is stupid or you believe the explanation but the behaviour is stupid. Seems an ‘interesting if true but I am dubious’ thing to me.
I always thought the educational hatin’ on wikipedia thing was deeply stupid.
Yes, indeed. Do we really believe ‘we told da yoof not to trust Wikipedia so they Google and believe the first hit’? It seems a bit ‘and then the whole bus cheered’ to me.
Teachers and lecturers yelling at people for using Wikipedia was a commonplace across at least the English-speaking world for a good decade, so why would we assume it had no effect?
Fair point, but it is the ‘we told da yoof not to trust Wikipedia so they Google and believe the first hit’ I am still having a problem with. Surely most ‘don’t use Wikipedia’ people also said ‘you need to use Serious Proper Books written by Serious Proper People’? Clearly that message could have got lost, though.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/10/how_apple_exploded_europes_crony_capitalism/
Discuss (or not).
I vote for the piece on the French socialists.