Historical Influence and Links Between Russia and the US Christian Right

We observe in the Anglosphere resurgence in conservative Christian nationalism of the right, becoming a central issue in ageing electorates, more in the US, Russia and Central Europe; both an electoral and policy strategy, plus supporting beliefs.

Some of the Anglo links are former Australian PM and now UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott with the ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, Donald Trump gaining support of Evangelical and ‘pro-life’ Christians, the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network and their influence on the conservative Christian CNP Council for National Policy, Koch influenced Federalist Society promoting ‘pro-life’ choices for SCOTUS on Roe vs. Wade, then sharing similar values with Orban et al. in Central Europe, and Putin in Russia too?

From Politico 2017:

‘How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right

While the U.S. passed gay-rights laws, Moscow moved hard the other way.

By CASEY MICHEL February 09, 2017

Casey Michel is a writer living in New York, and can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel. This article is adapted from a forthcoming report, entitled “The Rise of the ‘Traditionalist International’: How Moscow cultivates American white nationalists, domestic secessionists, and the Religious Right,” from People For the American Way.

In early April 2014, as the post-Cold War order roiled in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula—the first forced annexation in Europe since the Second World War—Pat Buchanan asked a question. Taking to the column-inches at Townhall, Buchanan wondered aloud: “Whose side is God on now?”

As Moscow swamped Ukraine’s peninsula, holding a ballot-by-bayonet referendum while local Crimean Tatars began disappearing, Buchanan clarified his query. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and intellectual flag-bearer of paleoconservatism—that authoritarian strain of thought linking both white nationalists and US President Donald Trump—wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today[.]” Despite Putin’s rank kleptocracy, and the threat Moscow suddenly posed to stability throughout Europe, Buchanan blushed with praise for Putin’s policies, writing, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.”

Three years on, it’s easy to skip past Buchanan’s piece in discussing Russian-American relations, drenched as they are in mutual sanctions and the reality that Moscow attempted to tip the scales in Trump’s favor during the election. But Buchanan’s article crystallized a paradigm shift in religious relations between Moscow and Washington, and in Moscow’s role within the global Christian right. Before 2014 Russia was largely seen as an importer for Christian fundamentalists, most especially from the U.S. But as the Kremlin dissolved diplomatic norms in 2014, Moscow began forging a new role for itself at the helm of the global Christian right.

And Moscow’s grip at the tiller of a globally resurgent right has only tightened since. Not only have Russian banks funded groups like France’s National Front, but Moscow has hosted international conferences on everything from neo-Nazi networking to domestic secessionists attempting to rupture the U.S. Meanwhile, American fundamentalists bent on unwinding minority protections in the U.S. have increasingly leaned on Russia for support—and for a model they’d bring to bear back home, from targeting LGBT communities to undoing abortion rights throughout the country.

“In the same sense that Russia’s [anti-LGBT] laws came about in 2013, we’ve seen similar sorts of laws proposed in Tennessee, for example,” Cole Parke, an LGBT researcher with Political Research Associates, told me. “It’s difficult to say in a chicken-and-egg sort of way who’s inspiring whom, but there’s definitely a correlation between the two movements.”

***

It’s no coincidence that Buchanan’s column, which outlined the players within the “cultural, social, moral war” between Russia and the “hedonistic” West, mentioned a semi-obscure group called the World Congress of Families. As Buchanan wrote, the WCF listed Russia’s emergence as a “Pro-Family Leader” as one of the “10 best trends” of 2013. Indeed, in order to outline how Russia challenged—and supplanted—the U.S. role as a clarion for Christian fundamentalists, you have to parse the WCF’s role, and the group’s attendant impact on Russian policy over the past few years.

Based out of Rockford, Ill., the WCF is an outgrowth of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. Claiming that it wants to “help secure the foundations of society” by, among other things, defending “the natural family founded on marriage between a man and a woman,” the WCF is run by Brian Brown, who also acts as the co-founder and president of the far right, and vehemently anti-gay, National Organization for Marriage. Just this week, Brown landed in Moscow to, as BuzzFeed reported, help continue constructing trans-Atlantic links between Russia and the American Religious Right.

In the two decades since its formal founding in 1997 the WCF has become one of the primary poles around which far-right U.S. evangelicals have exported their fundamentalism, as well as one of the world’s foremost anti-LGBT organizations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the WCF “is one of the key driving forces behind the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia”—not that the WCF would necessarily take offense to the charge. In 2016, for instance, the WCF hosted a conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, in which, as Coda reported, speakers encouraged attendees to “stay firm against homofascists” and “rainbow radicals.” Conference topics ranged from how sexual education “undermine[s] the family and parental authority” to looking at how court systems push “Anti-family indoctrination.” (The WCF did not return multiple attempts for comment.)

But the WCF isn’t a wholly American export; this isn’t simply some effort to push Christian extremism alongside baseball and apple pie for foreign consumption. Rather, the WCF is a product of joint Russian-American homophobic ingenuity. As Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida, recently detailed, the WCF was the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, a pair of sociology professors at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Allan Carlson, WCF’s current president emeritus. 

The two Russians, according to Mother Jones, were casting about for a means to stave off their country’s looming “demographic winter”—the idea that progressive legislation, from birth control to LGBT rights, will precipitate civilizational collapse—and stumbled over Carlson’s prior work. Gathering in the apartment of a “Russian Orthodox mystic,” the trio outlined an organization that would help oversee a global Christian right—and restore Russia to a position abdicated during the atheistic Soviet period.

Indeed, while the West saw substantial progressive gains since the WCF’s inception, Russia underwent a stark lurch in the opposite direction. Not only has Moscow, most especially under Putin’s third term, grabbed the rudder of the global anti-gay movement, but it has further unraveled even the most basic abortion rights protocols. To wit, in 2011 the Kremlin enacted an anti-abortion bill that, as The Nation wrote, “many pro-choice activists regard as the first volley in an effort to ban the procedure altogether.”

But this legislation didn’t arise in a vacuum, especially when Moscow was the world’s first to legalize the procedure. Rather, those Russian legislators pushing a domestic abortion clampdown looked to their American colleagues—specifically, the WCF—for inspiration. 

After all, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Duma member Yelena Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF honchos, including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs, settled into Moscow for a “Demographic Summit,” the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date. As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said, “It was 100-percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists and conservative circles of several European countries where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.” Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material: The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”

***

Shortly after the summit’s close, Putin announced plans to return to the presidency, supplanting then-President Dmitry Medvedev. Buffeted by a flat economy, Putin shored up his support by tacking to a nativist, nationalist—and resentful—base. In the first 18 months after his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin corralled protesters, smothered many of the remaining independent media outlets, and dissolved the distance between the Kremlin and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. All of his moves pointed toward a hard-right shift in outlook—to a return to Tsar Nicholas I’s triumvirate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”

America’s Christian fundamentalists followed Putin’s moves with glee—all the more after then-President Barack Obama earned a second term, and same-sex rights charged forward. In 2013, Moscow pushed an “anti-propaganda law” specifically targeting the country’s beleaguered LGBT population. Despite widespread condemnation throughout the West, members of America’s Religious Right tripped over themselves in supporting the Kremlin.

Likewise, as a Daily Beast report found, the “anti-propaganda law,” like the anti-abortion measures before it, didn’t arise in some kind of retrograde ether, but “had emerged from a years-long, carefully crafted campaign to influence governments to adopt a Christian-Right legal framework”—stemming from the efforts of both American and Russian WCF officials who had “successfully disseminated a U.S.-born culture war that’s wreaking havoc on women and queer folks all around the world.” Even Moscow’s ban on Americans adopting Russian children that year managed to gain support within the U.S.’s far right, with Christian fundamentalists praising Putin’s move as preventing children from living with same-sex parents.

And then, in early 2014, Russia began its invasion of southern Ukraine, claiming Crimea and sparking sanctions, animus and the downing of Flight MH17—the destruction of which almost certainly came at the hands of Russia-backed separatists. In the midst of the greatest breach between the Kremlin and the White House in decades, the WCF confirmed plans to host its annual September 2014 conference in Moscow. Suddenly, though, a pair of the WCF’s biggest boosters in Russia—Mizulina and former Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin—were placed on the U.S. sanctions list. Citing “uncertainties surrounding sanctions,” the WCF pulled its official imprimatur from the conference.

But that didn’t stop WCF higher-ups from attending the conclave, rechristened “Large Families: The Future of Humanity,” or from cementing further links with those close to the Kremlin. Not only have WCF fundamentalists continued building ties with ultra-Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, but, as Stroop told me, the conference “was pretty much what it was supposed to be.” (To get a taste of Malofeev’s views, he believes Orthodox Christians can’t be fascist because “Russians suffered from Nazis more than any other nation in the world.”) As journalist Hannah Levintova wrote in 2014, the conference went off with a “nearly identical title” and took place “in the same location, on the same dates, and with a similar schedule[.]” For good measure, Alexey Komov, the WCF’s official Russian representative, told a Russian media outlet the WCF was still helping organize the conference.

This time, though, something was different. Two years into Putin’s third term, and a few months after the Kremlin upended the post-Cold War order, Russia was coalescing support from far-right forces across the West, ranging from the white nationalists who would buoy Trump’s campaign to political groups bent on fracturing NATO and the European Union. While Washington pushed toward legalization of same-sex marriage, Russia, to Christian fundamentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly regressed into the world’s primary bulwark for nominally “traditional” values.

The 2014 conference, Stroop told me, was “a crystallization of this moment of nationalization and exporting [of nominally ‘traditional’ values] on the Russian side—of Russia taking the lead. … There was a moment when Mizulina was saying that it would be impossible for this kind of conference to take place in Europe or America right now.” Mizulina, of course, was mistaken; the 2015 conference took place in Salt Lake City, just a few months after the Obergefell decision legalized same-sex marriage across America. But in that milieu, in that broader political moment, Russia, to those following the threads of Christian fundamentalism, made a play at wresting control of the global Christian right from the U.S.

And Moscow may well have succeeded—and has now even surpassed its American counterparts in terms of regressive social legislation, recently pulling back criminal penalties for domestic violence. As Stroop added, recalling the aftermath of the 2014 conference, “Russia is taking on the mantle of leadership of global social conservatism. … [That conference] gave Russia the chance to say, ‘We’re the leaders here.’ And people have responded to that, and followed along.”

***

After all, it’s not as if it’s difficult to unearth the fundamentalists fawning over Putin’s putative turn toward God. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the American Family Association, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Evangelical Franklin Graham has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Buchanan only continues praising Putin. Even recent frictions—see: Russia’s recent legislation against non-Orthodox proselytizing—have hardly dampened US fundamentalists’ newfound fervor for Moscow. And if Trump decides to deprioritize rolling back same-sex or abortion rights, the U.S. far right will look to Moscow even further support, ensconcing the Kremlin’s position that much more.

We might not know, per Buchanan’s early questions, whose side God is on. But those in Russia are happy to return the support from America’s radical Christian extremists—and clutch the mantle of Christian fundamentalist leadership as long as they can, even after Trump’s election. “They’re using the history of anti-communism as a means of making a point,” Stroop told me. “They’re saying: ‘We survived communism, and so we know how to resist it.’ And they’re playing right into this whole script, which is a Cold War script, that communism and secularism are the same thing.”

It remains to be seen how the trans-Atlantic relationships among socially conservative Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians shift under Trump, whose pockets, like Putin, are clearly far deeper than his godliness. For the time being, though, there’s a clear head of the global Christian right. As the WCF’s Jacobs said following the 2014 enclave in Moscow, “I think Russia is the hope for the world right now.”’

For related blogs & articles on Australian Politics, Conservative, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Political Strategy, Russia & White Nationalism click through:

Anglosphere Conservatives Links – ADF Alliance Defending Freedom – Heritage Foundation

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship ARC and Anglo Right Wing Grifters

Abortion Reproductive Rights for Conservatives or GOP Evangelical Christian Support

Global Population Decline and Impacts

The developed world zeitgeist, especially Anglosphere, is that population growth has been one of the key issues of environmental sustainability and nativist conservative politics, left and right.  However, as the article from First Links below explains, we are in fact approaching peak population, due to below replacement fertility and to be followed by ageing and decline, or balance?

Many are realising that ‘population growth’ is not such an issue, it has stalled with long term fertility decline (below replacement), while recent analysis suggests peak mid century (Lancet etc.) while researchers Bricker & Ibbitson (‘Empty Planet’) predict precipitous decline after the peak.

The headline number is not the issue but as the late Hans Rosling said, it’s the make-up and how the population is managed at different life stages e.g. oldies now outnumber youth which has electoral repercussions when voting for short term horizons aka Brexit.

Population obsessions, have also been used to support an unsubstantiated environmental link of ‘sciency sounding’ PR that deflects from carbon regulation, fossil fuels, often blames ‘immigration’ to at least preserve the status quo; from the time of Malthus and Galton through ZPG, and the UNPD (whose formulae are used by ABS & UK too).

The issue is not just skills gaps nor is demanding all retirees continue to work (involuntarily), but how to fund budgets when we are dependent upon taxes from working age and temporary churnover via PAYE system, but these cohorts are in decline viz a viz increasing numbers of retirees?

OECD demographic data, i.e. medium to long term trends of working age/retirees + kids, is more informative and gives comparisons with other nations, vs. our obsessions with short term headline NOM net overseas migration data snapshots that make for media headlines (but normally dominated by students and backpackers).

Quite obvious, like elsewhere, temporary churn over is important, as ‘net financial contributors’ to support budgets, when more retirees/pensioners are tugging on the same with ageing declining tax payers.

Click through to see OECD Australian working age demographics with other comparable nations. 

All have passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, hence, how can budgets be supported further? Increase taxes for low income types and/or retirees (mooted in the US by some in the GOP), or cut services and health care, or privatise more services for user pays (political suicide)?

From First Links Newsletter Australia:

‘Embracing the bright side of population decline

Emma Davidson   30 March 2022

A growing body of research is showing that global population growth is slowing down and will likely drop into negative territory within the next few decades.

One study predicted that the global population would peak at 9.7 billion people in 2064 – up from around 7.9 billion currently – before falling to 8.8 billion by the end of this century. If this is true, it’ll be the first sustained period of world population decline since the Black Death.

But what’s worrying some experts today is that many countries are already seeing natural population growth come to a standstill. Here in Australia, the lack of immigration contributed to population growth of practically zero in the year to March 2021 . Similar stories are playing out in the UK, the US, and many other developed countries.

Shrinking populations and financial markets

What economic impact will these demographics shifts have? After all, we can’t ignore the human aspect of our economies. Financial markets are complex, interconnected ecosystems, and our attitudes and behaviour are key to how they perform.

Well, when it comes to population decline, many analysts are bearish.

They say lower birth rates create ageing nations, with fewer people available to look after the elderly. These stretched workforces limit innovation and productivity. Growing economies need growing populations, it is claimed.

However, I believe this is an overly pessimistic view. I’m far more bullish about the impact of declining populations. There are many possible benefits to having fewer people in the world. And I suspect even the negatives aren’t quite as bad as people suggest, given humans have an incredible knack for adapting to change.

Wage growth

It’s widely thought that a smaller working-age population could lift wages. Fewer workers give the labour market greater bargaining power, leading to better working conditions.

There would also likely be more opportunities for women and ethnic minorities, increasing workforce diversity. Research shows that diverse organisations tend to financially outperform their less inclusive competitors. They are also six times more likely to be innovative and agile.

Economic growth might slow, but it is my hope that the above changes would lead to healthier, happier, and more engaged workers – and a more even wealth distribution.

The late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling argued convincingly for bringing the world’s final 1 billion people out of extreme poverty to limit population growth and provide better opportunities for millions of families who are struggling.

I’m confident that humans can adjust to a ‘new normal’ where economic growth is still a goal, but not the only goal. Instead, perhaps we can focus more on creating a world where living standards and wealth distribution are our barometers of success.

Then, freed from poverty, some people will inevitably go on to become the scientists, entrepreneurs and leaders of tomorrow that we’ll need when populations decline.

Innovation and productivity

The conventional logic is that bigger is better when it comes to population and innovation. More people means more researchers and innovators (as well as more consumers to sell to). And yet, only three of Bloomberg’s top 10 most innovative economies have populations exceeding 10 million people (South Korea, Germany and Sweden).

So, it’s clearly not just a numbers game.

Investing in education and encouraging more people to work in research and development also facilitates the flow of new ideas. Furthermore, automation can accelerate innovation and productivity by performing all of the tedious, time-consuming tasks that would usually fall to humans, freeing them up for more value-oriented work.

Initial predictions for automation were bleak. The ‘rise of the robots’ would mean job losses, economists said, as employers replaced workers en-masse with machines that never get sick or tired.

More recent research is challenging that theory. One study found that each robot per 1,000 employees boosts employment at a firm by 2.2%. Essentially, automation makes companies more competitive and profitable, helping them to grow the business and swell their ranks.

Sustainability matters

It’s common to hear industry commentators make statements like “ignoring the environmental benefits for a moment” or “sustainability aside” when talking about population decline. But we can’t simply forget about the environment. It’s too important. Ever-growing populations continue to put a strain on the world and its resources.

Declining populations can help

Researchers recently calculated that having one child fewer saves approximately 59 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. “Having one less child saves each parent more than 20 times (of CO2 emissions) as living without a car, or about 70 times as much as eliminating meat from the diet” Sustainable Population Australia says.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that people should stop having children. I have written previously about the potential repercussions of a ‘baby bust’ if rising infertility rates are ignored. In addition, and as things stand right now, the global human population begins to decline at the end of this century and is likely to continue along the decline trajectory.

What I am wanting to highlight is the environmental benefits that are associated with population decline.

Finding the right balance

Of course, there are some roles that robots simply can’t fill. Ageing populations will place more pressure on our healthcare and elderly care systems, for example. And it’s hard to imagine artificial intelligence ever having as good a bedside manner as a real doctor or nurse.

Australia’s healthcare and superannuation systems are excellent, which should relieve some of this burden. But we must also find ways to make certain roles, such as elderly care, more rewarding.

Automation is therefore just one piece of the puzzle. We must also recognise there are complex services that only humans can provide.

There are undoubtedly challenges we face with declining populations, and I don’t pretend to have the answers.

But do our narratives have to be so gloomy? There is far more room for optimism based on the human capacity to adapt.’

Emma Davidson is Head of Corporate Affairs at London-based Staude Capital, manager of the Global Value Fund (ASX:GVF). This article is the opinion of the writer and does not consider the circumstances of any individual.

For more articles and blogs on immigration, population growth, demography and economics click through:

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Hans Rosling – GapMinder – Factfulness – Human Development – Adult Education

China PRC – Fertility Decline – Peak Population?

Population Growth or Decline?

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’ 

Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.

However, by 2012 Randers had revised own his global population peak estimate down to 8 billion or so which concurs with more recent research of Bricker & Ibbitson presented in ‘Empty Planet’ and The Lancet peer reviewed research paper by Stein Emil Vollset et al. titled ‘The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power’ which states that fertility rates have declined much faster than expected.

‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?

Giles Parkinson 7 November 2012

What will the world look like in 40 years time. In 2052, will we have enough food and water? Will there be too many people? Will our standard of living be higher. Will we have taken decisive action on climate change.

To briefly summarise Jorgen Randers, the renowned Norwegian futurist, the broad answers to those are yes, yes, maybe, no and no. But it’s the way he reaches those conclusions that makes his latest book 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years, so compelling.

Randers made his name as the co-author of the book “The Limits to Growth”, which underpinned the Club of Rome’s work on resource depletion and helped spawn the sustainability movement. Not that he thinks the book and his work had that much impact. “I spent 40 years working on sustainability and failed. The world today is a much less sustainable world,” he lamented during a visit to Australia this week.

Now 67, Randers runs the centre for climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School.  And having outlined 12 scenarios for the world running from 1970 to 2100 in his first book, he now feels there is enough information to make more concrete forecasts.

It is not a picture he finds particularly attractive, but one he sees as inevitable because of mankind’s inability to look beyond short-term solutions and the obsession with growth. “I’m not saying what should happen, but this is the sad future that humanity is going to create for itself.”

Here are the base numbers for his predictions. Unlike others that predict a world population of 9 billion in 2050, he sees it peaking at 8 billion in 2040 and then declining, because he says the rich world will choose jobs over children, and the poorer urban families will choose fewer children.

He expects the world economy to grow much slower than most, because it will be harder to increase productivity at the same rate as has occurred in the last four decades. The low hanging fruit in the agricultural, manufacturing and office sectors have been picked. And he does not believe the poor countries will “take off”. He says that by 2050, the world economy will be no more than 2.5 times bigger than it is today, rather than four times bigger as many assume.

The US has a bleak outlook because their average disposable incomes will not grow, because they have already gone further than most in productivity and have a huge debt to China. And, Randers says, because the US is not capable of making simple decisions, it will also be not capable of making difficult decisions. He puts the current debate around climate change, or the lack of it, as an example.

“China is the real winner and they will be 5 times as rich in 40 year time,” Randers says. That’s because of China’s ability to make quick decisions that are in favour of the majority. 

The rest of the world, he suggests, remains poor

Still, while the economy and the population will not grow as fast as some predict, and there will be no huge shortage of food, water or energy, it will still grow fast enough to trigger a climate crisis, because the short termism of the political class and business means that greenhouse emissions will not be addressed. He expects emissions will peak between 2030 and 2040, and will have only returned to 2010 levels by 2050 – pushing the world beyond the 2°C scenario and locking in disastrous climate reactions in the second half of the century.

“We will spend more money repairing the damage of climate change after it has occurred instead of spending up front avoiding the climate damage,” he says. “We know what to do. The only reason we do not do it is because it is slightly more expensive than doing nothing, so we don’t do it. It is very frustrating.”

He says capitalism is design to allocate money in the short term, and any efforts by politicians to suggest that capital be allocated to the longer term is usually rejected by voters. (He could be talking about the Australian political debate). And he doesn’t hold up much hope for international agreements, at least not of the sort being sort by the UN from 192 nations on climate policy. “If you had 192 wives and were deciding where to put the sofa in the living room, you would understand the problem.”

Click through for more articles about Demography, Environment, GDP Growth, Limits to Growth, Population Growth & Younger Generations.

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

‘As Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians’

We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded.  This is not organic, but political strategists, ideologues and media have been gaming ageing electorates through platforming them and their concerns, then using PR techniques and messaging to reinforce and spread further via related negative proxy issues, for power.  

As New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of ‘Dark Money’ fame explained, it’s not just manipulating ‘what’ we think about issues but ‘how’ we think (or not, just reflex)’.  The latter follows the playbook in the US used to inform conservatives of both left and right who are also catered to, while other cohorts and issues are avoided. For example, youth, working age and immigrants are becoming irrelevant, especially in regions, while middle aged and older have been empowered to kick down and lash out at mostly imagined cultural issues.

The Conversation in Australia had a related article titled:

‘More grey tsunami than youthquake: despite record youth enrolments, Australia’s voter base is ageing (29 April 2019). The 2019 election has been heralded as a “generational election” or an “age war”. Labor goes to the election with a series of policies on climate change, housing affordability, wages and budget sustainability clearly designed to appeal to young and middle-aged Australians concerned about their future’.

But while the record numbers of enrolled young voters may make this look like a political masterstroke, the fact remains that Australia’s voter base, like its population, is ageing. Baby boomers will remain a political force in this country for some time to come.’

A good example exemplifying the array of forces and dynamics has been the nativist libertarian obsessions with immigration and population growth as drivers of environmental degradation and carbon emissions, while deflecting from fossil fuels and need for robust environmental regulation; ‘libertarain trap’ informed by fossil fuels, eugenics and supported by ageing voters. 

Another example via research from Goldsmiths London also explained Brexit in terms of ‘collective narcissism’ by Golec de Zavala, Guerra and Simão (27 Nov 2017) in ‘The Relationship between the Brexit Vote and Individual Predictors of Prejudice: Collective Narcissism, Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation’ stated:

‘The Leave campaign in the U.K., which advocated exiting the European Union, emphasized anxiety over immigration and the need to take control of the U.K.’s borders. Citizens who expressed concerns about immigration to the U.K. were more likely to vote to leave. Two correlational studies examined the previously unexplored question of whether the Brexit vote and support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum were linked to individual predictors of prejudice toward foreigners: British collective narcissism (a belief in national greatness), right wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. The results converged to indicate that all three variables were independently related to the perceived threat of immigrants and, via this variable, to the Brexit vote and a support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum’

Further, in 2018 similar dynamics were identified by Campanella in ‘Is Pensioner Populism Here to Stay?’ stating:

‘The right-wing populism that has emerged in many Western democracies in recent years could turn out to be much more than a blip on the political landscape. Beyond the Great Recession and the migration crisis, both of which created fertile ground for populist parties, the ageing of the West’s population will continue to alter political power dynamics in populists’ favour….…Most likely, a growing sense of insecurity is pushing the elderly into the populists’ arms. Leaving aside country-specific peculiarities, nationalist parties all promise to stem global forces that will affect older people disproportionately.’

Of course other nations also learn, one suspects armies of Republican GOP related ‘grifters’ masquerading as election and campaign consultants advise many conservative right wing governments in Europe, especially Central Eastern Europe, applying similar tactics.  

The most infamous has been the ‘Soros conspiracy’ from former (deceased) GOP pollster Arthur Finkelstein, introduced by Netanyahu and advised the Orban government in Hungary, understanding which ‘buttons to push’ then using old conspiracies based round ‘blood libel’, anti-semitism (although Jewish himself) and old eugenics movement tropes exemplified by ‘the great replacement’ and ‘demographic suicide’.

According to Balogh in Hungarian Spectrum in ‘The Genesis of Orban’s Anti-Soros Campaign’:

‘They worked for Romanian, Bulgarian, and Czech politicians before, on Netanyahu’s recommendation, Viktor Orbán hired them. This was in early 2008, after two lost elections, and Fidesz was in search of new ideas that could lead to victory. According to the Finkelstein formula, Orbán needed an enemy.’ (15 Jan 2019).

Following is a recent academic article on the Hungarian experience of ‘collective narcissism’, shared by other nations unwittingly:

‘The role of collective narcissism in populist attitudes and the collapse of democracy in Hungary

Dorottya Lantos, Joseph P. Forgas

First published: 18 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.80

Abstract

What are the psychological processes responsible for the recent spread of populist political systems and movements? All political systems essentially reflect the mental representations of their populations, and collective narcissism has recently emerged as a contributing factor in the rise of populism. This article presents two studies examining the role of collective narcissism in predicting populist attitudes and voting intentions in Hungary. Hungary offers a particularly important case study of state-sponsored populism and illiberalism in Europe, as this country has gone furthest in undermining democratic principles and practices within the EU…. 

The emergence in the past few years of populist, anti-liberal political movements in a number of countries presents an important challenge for psychologists (Albright, 2018; Pinker, 2018). While millions of would-be migrants see Western liberal democracies as their best hope for a better future, many voters in the very same countries are now turning their backs on their successful and well-tried political model. The rise of populism occurred in both highly developed Western countries (e.g., USA, Britain, France, and Austria) and in nations with weak democratic traditions (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Russia). 

This paper explores the role of psychological factors, such as collective narcissism, in the rise of populism in Hungary. Hungary is now arguably the most “populist” and illiberal nation within the EU (Garton Ash, 2019) and the first member state in the history of the EU to be categorized as not a democracy (Freedom House, 2020). Specifically, we seek to explain how endemic feelings of betrayal and inferiority as reflected in the quote above by Mr. Orbán can lead to the spread of authoritarian nationalism and populism as identified in the second quote above.

This paper reports the first empirical evidence indicating that collective narcissism is a significant, albeit perhaps indirect predictor of populist attitudes in Hungary, the most illiberal country within the EU. We found that conservatism influences the effects of collective narcissism, an important finding in understanding how mental representations shape political attitudes. As Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. 

Evolutionary psychological research on the fundamental characteristics of human cognition now confirms that humans are indeed highly predisposed to embrace fictitious symbolic belief systems as a means of enhancing group cohesion and coordination (Harari, 2014; von Hippel, 2018). We believe that collective narcissism is a promising construct in our quest to fully understand the psychological variables responsible for the recent historical rise of populist and illiberal political movements worldwide.’

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Population Decline and Effects on Taxation, Benefits, Economy and Society

While Australian media, politicians and commentators obsess, through an inflated and nativist Malthusian view, about undefined immigration, NOM net overseas migration and population growth, the ‘elephant in the room’ is ignored.  The misdefined  ‘immigration’ that media obsesses about is mostly ‘churn over’ of temporary residents e.g. international students,  caught up in the NOM net overseas migration, as ‘net financial contributors’ to budgets through taxes paid to support increasing numbers of retirees; backgrounded by a commensurate decline in the permanent population’s working age cohort. 

Warning is that as baby boomers and oldies dominate electoral rolls, governments especially conservative, cater to the same cohorts at the expense of younger generations following which in future could include higher future taxes and lower public services.

Following are excerpts or summary based upon two articles from MorningStar’s FirstLinks newsletter focusing upon the demographic, economic and social effects of past baby booms, retirement, ageing, longevity and social services in a future with fewer working age tax-payers.

‘The populations of key countries are shrinking 

Michael Collins  17 June 2020

Released by US film producer Mike Moore, the documentary Planet of the Humans tells how renewable sources of energy are flawed solutions to mitigate the dangers of climate change.

About halfway through the documentary, a scientist laments that the environment’s biggest problem is that “there are too many human beings using too much, too fast”. The warning here and elsewhere in the documentary is that only a reduction in the world’s population can save the planet.

Declining birth rates

Well, in that case, the battle against climate change is winnable because the populations of many countries are shrinking. The OECD says that only three (Israel, Mexico and Turkey) of its 37 members have fertility rates above the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

The UN reports the reproduction rates of all European countries are below replenishment levels. The EU forecasts that the populations of 12 of its 27 member countries will shrink in coming decades as only immigration props up numbers in the others. The World Bank predicts China’s population will decline by 100 million people by 2050, that East Asia’s will shrink from the 2030s and Brazil’s will contract from the late 2040s by when India’s population growth will be static.

Already dwindling are the populations of Russia (since 1992), Japan (first in 2008 and uninterrupted since 2010, see below) and Italy (since 2014). But for immigration, many Anglo countries with declining birth rates including Australia and the US would be shrinking population-wise too.

Many demographers say, if anything, the global bodies are underestimating the declines in population numbers. Social and economic forces that lowered birth rates in advanced countries are now universal across the emerging world. These factors include expectations of low infant mortality, rising female education, better career prospects for women, and urbanisation.

Fewer births in the emerging world, these demographers say, will see the world’s population diminish from a peak of between eight and nine billion people from around the middle of this century, whereas the UN forecasts the world’s population to increase another three billion to 10.9 billion by 2100.

The economic impact

The consequences of declining populations could be significant and mostly grim, any environmental benefits aside. Fewer births reduce what is probably the biggest motivational force in society; young parents seeking a better life for their children. In economic terms, declining populations are a bigger challenge than ageing populations because the former herald a lasting shortfall in private demand that points to lower output, even if GDP per capita might rise. Businesses will invest less if fewer people are consuming less. Such outcomes hint at the ‘Japanification’ of economies; deflation and almost permanent recessions for economies that prove impervious to stimulus.

Government finances face difficulties as the shrinking and ageing of populations accelerates because a smaller working-age cohort must support more elderly people who cost more health-wise. A stretched bunch of fewer workers could lead to reduced innovation and productivity gains. Government policy, especially with regards to taxation and social-security spending, could become skewed towards the elderly rather than productivity should older voters form a voting bloc.

Turning point: the 2020s baby boom retirement surge

Bernard Salt   24 March 2021

And so, what can we expect of the balance of the 2020s beyond the coronavirus?

It is likely for example that there will be greater use of technology and a lesser engagement with China. It is also possible that the community will take a renewed interest in hand washing, in appreciating family, in having the freedom to travel beyond Australia. These ‘reactions’ to events triggered by the pandemic are logical enough, I suppose, but there is something else sitting out there, lurking (with intent) in the middle of the decade.

Baby boom must lead to a baby bust

It is something demographers have known about for decades. Indeed, there have been books written (by demographers) about its impact. This menace goes by the name of the baby bust. If you accept there was a baby boom in the 1950s then 70 years later the limitations of human life dictate that there will be, there must be, a baby bust.

In a crude sense, the baby bust takes effect when baby boomers press into their 70s and – how shall I put this? – then they die off. But the baby bust is more than this. It will trigger workforce and funding issues that will need to be managed. More baby boomers aged 65 exiting the workforce than 15-year-olds entering the workforce leads to a diminution of workers and, some would say, also of taxpayers.

The number of people entering the so-called ‘retirement age’ of 65+ has ramped up over time. In the 1990s, for example, Australia’s 65-and-over population increased by an average of around 40,000 per year (see graphic). Retirees in this decade were born in the 1920s.

But 30 years later in the 2020s it’s a different story. The number of Australians being added to the 65+ cohort every year will rise during this post-pandemic decade passing 126,000 in 2021, peaking at 137,000 in 2026, before subsiding to 105,000 in 2030. This surge in the retiree population is caused, of course, by the great baby boom of the 1950s.

Impact of surge into retirement towards five million

The transitioning of the baby boom population from working age to retirement stage will ‘play out’ in the post-covid 2020s. The retirement cohort will continue to expand for another five years creating a community culture that is hyper-sensitive to retirement issues.

It could be argued that the social impact of ‘retired Australians’, based on underlying demography, will not begin to subside until later in the decade.

In this context the period 2021-2027 will represent the peak years of the Australian baby-boom retirement surge. Not only is this an issue of the retirement cohort’s collective voice (now close to five million) but this will also translate into an elevation of retirement issues such as concerns about health care and aged care and access to various aged-based financial concessions.

Baby boomers will not age as past generations did

Baby boomers in retirement, peaking in the middle of the 2020s, but extending in progressively fewer numbers into the 2030s and 2040s, will be determined not to age as their parents aged. They are already railing against ageism. Many are remaining in the workforce. Some are re-partnering later in life. Some are choosing to remain single (but not lonely) in life’s later years.

The concept of a large proportion of the population living beyond the age of 65, being dependent upon the goodwill of younger cohorts, and the reliability of governments to uphold the social contract implicit in the idea of ‘ageing with dignity’ are all new to humanity.

What to do with the aged wasn’t a problem for previous generations in history.

It could be argued that the 2020s really is a turning point and not just because of the new world that is likely to emerge from the post-pandemic ashes, but because of the longevity of life for perhaps one-fifth or one-sixth of the Australian population.’

For more articles and blogs about Ageing Democracy, Australian Politics, Demography, Economics, GDP Growth, Government Budgets, Immigration, NOM Net Overseas Migration, Population Growth,  Populist Politics, Statistical Analysis, Superannuation, Taxation and Younger Generations.