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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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if you let them talk about policy, they mostly talk about crime and immigration. And when you do hear something about economics, 2/3 of the time it is a variant of "how can we afford X when we can't afford Y" where X is something that is perceived as benefitting foreigners, and most of the other 1/3 is about how much more expensive things are than they used to be

Maybe I'm the one in a bubble, but my experience of talking to this sort of people involves quite a lot more specific complaints about outsourcing and the disintegration of the industrial base. Then again I am French and most of the paupers I know are as well, so that colors my view quite a bit. But I did connect with people from other countries in the West and insofar as they fit this sociological mold, they seemed to have similar complaints, if expressed in less Marxist terms than what you'd find in France.

In any case, I appreciate you jumping to the interesting question here which is indeed what economic policy right-wing populist people actually support, given that your description of their messaging is broadly accurate.

I think that unlike what you're saying "we will protect the welfare-state-for-the-old by cutting white-collar government employees and welfare for immigrants" and "enviro-loonies are destroying jobs" are absolutely something that can be reduced into a coherent ideological economic policy.

And that's pretty self evidently that of economic nationalism.

The general narrative goes like this: the globalist elites passed free trade agreements and setup international trade unions to allow themselves to profit from arbitrage between every country and get the cheapest ressource and cheapest labour for their enterprises, in doing so they detached themselves from the bonds of national loyalty that previously locked them to the lower class of a given country and instead started to rule together on the entire world. Nationalists obviously view this as a betrayal, and moreover the generalization of migration as another way to further globalist interests through arbitrage again, with the added benefit of dissolving any remaining bonds of loyalty among populations by creating a multicultural free for all where the institutions that held nations together (Family, Religion, etc) are systematically destroyed in favor of ever more atomized alienation. Even things like environmentalism fit into this narrative as yet another assertion of domination where the interests and moral fads of those global elites come at the expense of the local native.

Moreover, the divide also maps onto that general opposition between cities and the countryside, given that the global elites almost exclusively live in large international metropolises whilst the local natives are most concentrated in suburban and countryside areas.

I'm not sure whether you'd call this political ideology cultural or economic, but in some sense that doesn't really matter. That constituency is real, and it's growing.

And the somewhat diverse economic policies you list can all be explained within that context, as pragmatic adaptations to the needs of the local constituency colored by the local nationalist tradition.

"Friend" is what you call someone who is on your side based on shared values

No, it's what you call someone who is on your side.

I suspect this is very much a country-to-country issue. When you live in a small country with a high income that is basically forced to be dependent on trade (not having all that much in the way of natural resource apart from lots of timber and some minerals), anything but basic-level protectionism is a dead issue, perhaps unless it's the whole of EU doing it. France is bigger and has former colonies it can still tap into and a general do-it-yourself culture insofar as political economy goes, it can afford to be protectionist in a way that Finland can't.