World Politics Doing the Right-Wing Shuffle?
Third, the world has moved to the right, politically, during the same period. We can start with the US, dominated during the last quarter-century by starboard-leaning leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. Here in Canada, the Prime Minister is Stephen Harper, a conservative who refused even to come to this conference. And to the south, Mexico just elected another conservative. Meanwhile, in Europe, such dominant figures as Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Jacques Chirac, and Silvio Berlusconi were on the right. And even their more liberal successors, many of them, were not exactly leftists, e.g. Tony Blair. Continuing our political survey, let's look elsewhere -- to, say, Russia. Say what you want about Vladimir Putin, he's no liberal.
And how about elsewhere around the world? In Asia, India is run these days by Hindu nationalists. China is run by Chinese nationalists, and Japan -- we know about Japanese leaders visiting their glory-days World War Two shrines. And Australia? John Howard, George W. Bush's good friend, has been in power for a decade and seems likely to stay for at least another term. And how about the Muslim world? There, the anti-liberal backlash has been, shall we say, pronounced, as ayatollahs and imams with beards reshape politics from Indonesia to Egypt to London. To be sure, there are counter-indicators, such as much of Latin America, which is voting left these days; yet even there, many leftists, including Brazil's Lula, aren't so left. Parenthetically, we might observe that the popular culture in many countries is libertarian, even libertine -- although it's probably only a matter of time before the political culture exerts its conservatizing influence.
When you add Poland to that list, as well, I think the case could be made that world politics have shifted in that direction. Pinkerton links this to AIDS + AIDS-activism, which is at the very least, an interesting thing to consider.
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