Headline: Populism faces its darkest hour

Sub-headline: But as its rightwing variant flags, the leftwing version could surge

The headline writers Financial Times have produced in the headline a fragment of melodrama that  Mr. Rachman’s wan polemic against Populism can’t vindicate! Both its ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ iterations are subject to the usual recitation of the Party Line of the respectable bourgeois scribbler. As I start to read Mr. Rachman’s essay I see a link to this essay:

Headline: Di Maio pledges his support to France’s yellow vest protesters

Sub-headline: Head of Italy’s Five Star movement urges demonstrators to emulate his party’s success

https://www.ft.com/content/66f419fc-129b-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

This seems to reify the link between Italian Neo-Fascism and the gilets jaunes!  The motto of the Financial Times is never let an opportunity go to waste, in the search for the defence of the fantasy of the Post -War Liberal Order, as the definitional point, that provides both historical meaning to the politics of the present, and the fact that this construct is under threat from the forces of extremist anarchy, defined as without foundation.

The bad actors of Populism in Mr. Rachman’s history made to measure: Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Alves, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jeremy Corbyn, López Obrador, and even the ghost of Hugo Chávez. With the added mention, of dull-witted enarque Emmanuel Macron, who makes an appearance to complete the attempt to construct an historical verisimilitude.

As Goya said ‘the sleep of reason bring forth monsters’ : define that slumber as  precipitated by the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and the reawakening of political activism on the fringes of the politics of that  ‘Center’ : Mr. Rachman defends as an indispensable part of that Post-War Centrist Myth. Think of Lippmann’s enthusiasm for ‘The Expert’, the precursor of the rule by Technocrats,  as the bulwark  against too much Democracy. And of the Technocrat Supreme Jean Monnet the mastermind of the Common Market, a coal and steel cartel, that remained a cartel with the window dressing of Federalism.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/2350acc2-125c-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e