Our new rulers

Our ruling classes are demonstrating a new initiative. It arises first in their political choices.

Most political commentators and analysts talk and write about a new populism that has arisen in the West. Populism is an odd term that explains very little. It has arisen as a response to the later part of the 20th Century and the early 21st, when the major political parties had coagulated and where voters declined to respond to the narrower and narrower options offered by those traditional mass parties.

Following the 2008 crash the class nature of the capitalist system in the West became immediately obvious to millions, perhaps billions. Most people were directly effected by the panicky shift of funds held by states that poured wealth into banks and then into stock exchanges, in order to prop up to the prevailing economic system across the West. It created the demand that ordinary people's needs should and could be met by governments and politicians. Accordingly, the (largely) new working class population demanded political action. It was this political upheaval that was first described as 'populism'; the naive, underdeveloped, simplistic demand by the working class that would drive inroads into capitalism's apparently universal domination and instead demand politics that acted in their favour.

When the media and the academics' wriggles and giggles finished; when the halo around 'Apple' and Obama lost their angelic haze, it was quite apparent to many people at the base of society that the ordinary political mechanisms in the West were still failing to respond to the new context. Springing up out of the decaying political history of the West came a range of alternatives. In the societies in eastern Europe that had broken up the remnants of the USSR, the golden EU had turned pretty sour, pretty quick. After 2008 in eastern Europe there was a choice of enemies; the suspicious, corrupt legions of ex-bureaucrats at home, or the slicker, richer and corrupter 'globalisers' in Brussels and, most of all, those centred in a united Germany and those refugees at the border of Greece and Turkey. The new racist right and their local bureaucrats and their billionaires filled the political gap. The political model became Putinised and Populist.

Further West, in Italy, institutional politics had always failed. The project that Italy, as a decisive component of an overall ruling class European leadership, had also begun to collapse. The political order now vies for another version of Mussolini or for taking over the squares. In France the traditional parties collapsed and Macron, the spirit of the age according to the Economist, is now also collapsing, as he concedes and concedes more and more of his Thatcherite plans to the trade unions. Macron's failing populism is in danger of mushrooming a new version under the banner of the fascists as the only means to stop the left. And on it goes.

Further West we have the UK, Ireland and the US.

In the UK, as things stand, a dramatically (albeit partially) reformed Labour Party, failed. Some correspondents thought Labour was the populist menace (now thoroughly defeated.) But meanwhile the Tories managed to break themselves up. They have now coalesced away from the policy favoured by leading elements of the traditional ruling class in Britain over the EU and, with its new block of working class voters, the Tories under Boris, have power. They call themselves the 'Peoples Government'. They used Brexit as their leverage. They succeeded in smashing the their own image of a ten-year Tory government that openly and proudly delivered nothing but poverty! They used their new bloc of ex Labour voters, their new patriotism and the use of Brexit as the second victory of WW2 to build what is now the real successful British populism.

In Ireland, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fail have been defeated - from the Sinn Fain led left. Another 'populist' manoeuvre? Even the British correspondents doubt it. It is certainly another serious upheaval; one that arose from a working class population that saw the results of 2008. The British elite savoured Varadkar for his 'progressiveness' and his Cameron type alliance with low company taxation, mainly EU based. Varadkar had, has, no intention of returning Northern Ireland to Ireland - even given the complexity of  EU borders in the island. Now the shadow of the disintegration of the UK hangs over British politics. In the event that politics in Ireland genuinely move that way - then - as with the remodelled Tories in Britain, a 'real' populist politics will start to surface.

The US demonstrates the most advanced character of the new populism. As a successful political agency, US populism has now shown most of its features. As with the transformation of the British Tory Party the Republicans back Trump completely. Apparently Trump's 'America first' slogan cut against the US's ruling classes in respect of their global reach; but little damage has actually occurred, in banking, among the international corporations (where using force against free trade has often proved handy in China etc.) The biggest corporate tax cut keep profits high and the stock market ebullient. Most important of all has been the political block that the Democrats potentially broke with Obama (who dismally failed) has now, for the time being, been nailed up. Populism in America is the exciting way to maintain the status quo.

And this is the point about the modern version of populism.

If we take the EU issue in British politics - ostensibly the British ruling class opposed Brexit to the hilt. The structure of successful capitalism in Britain depended on open access to the biggest market in the world. But what happened? The hilt proved less important than the rise of the left, coming out of the experience of 2008. It cannot be picked out, British billionaire by billionaire, but the risk of the Corbyn government proved more immediate than Brexit. The Tory Party, the party of Britain's ruling class for centuries, helped create a populist Tory government as the means of destroying Corbyn's danger.

There are several analyses of the structure of the modern ruling class in the UK and internationally. Certainly deep national attachments to the great sources of wealth operating in the UK are diminishing. Practically speaking most very wealthy Brits live all over the world with their compatriots from other countries. The British state is still essential as the 2008 crash shows, but it is not the location of British wealth that matters, it is the political and legal safety of its institutions, (including most of the world'd tax havens) that keeps it defined as 'home.'

That's the point of populism and the populist parties and movements now emerging across the West. Neither big Capital mainly based in country by country, nor the consensual politics between the major political parties, can be resurrected. The US Democrats are not going to cut Trump away with a 'love you all' consensus Democrat President. The Tories needed their internal revolution to stall the British left. The working classes in the West have already suffered a drastic reduction in their standards of living. There is neither a social nor an economic basis for a return to consensus. The promotion of self-styled populism is the first step in the polarisation of Western society. And big Capital knows what side it is on. It showed its mettle in Nazi Germany.