Populism, paranoia and the pandemic

N Cohen in the Observer is spot on for much of his piece:

A global wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic....A few might experience lockdown as something close to a holiday and rhapsodise on the joys of home baking and box sets. As insiders stay inside, they save the money they would have spent in shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agents - the places where the insecure, the luckless nine out of 10 in the bottom half of earners who cannot work from home, once made their livings.

 What applies to individuals applies to corporations and private equity funds that are strong enough to buy up distressed assets at a fraction of their pre-crisis value. ...private equity is likely “to play both sides”: soaking up government largesse and profiting from market mayhem. It won’t, [a spokesperson] concluded, “look great when we consider the political economy of the pandemic a year from now”. [Examples include] the manoeuvres of the US private equity firms thinking of deploying hundreds of billions of dollars they hold in reserve as high-interest loans to struggling companies. The arguments this month about a Chinese state-owned investment firm buying up the British chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies...As the economic crisis we are entering looks worse than 2008, worse indeed than anything anyone alive can remember, the rise of corporate giants seems assured.

It’s not a recipe for social peace..  Democracy was [seen as] a racket [after 2008]. Taxpayers had to rescue the richest people in the world and then suffer years of stagnant wages and cut public services to meet the bill. If you need a one-line explanation for populism, this is the best there is....

Still seeing populism as a pathology, of coure, not as a rational response.He mentions Nazis and Stalinists in the article -- but not Brexit specifically. It's a dog whistle?

Overall, only a bit of petty bourgeois class interest grounded in the usual uncomfortable place between ruthless 'big business' and proto-fascist 'populists'.

There is always the witty and subtle Observer cartoonist to amuse us: