Sarkozy is certainly not "socialist", just like he isn't the dangerous, hard right bad wolf he was framed to be in the electoral campaign.
He was a demagogue then (focusing on the anti-immigrant "toughness" rhteoric and dog-whistles) and he is a demagogue now. What else is new.
Call is pragmatism if you will. I'll call it opportunism and spin. Say it's ideology on my side if you care to. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
For the Left, there are two possible positions: pro or against immigrants, both of them ideological. For a realist, there are two indisputable facts: one, that most immigrants are poor and ghetto-ised; the other, that most citizens in poor or immigrant areas cannot stand any more barbarian actions.
None of these facts are ideological, they are there, on the field. There actually is a minority of barbarians, hence need for public safety measures. There actually is poverty and precarious life, so aid should be provided, and at the same time illegal and family immigration diminished.
This is pure reality and rational approach. You see this as rightwing because you probably consider any discussion about safety as such. Thing is, there actually is insecurity, that's not an invention of the rightwing to scare people into voting them in. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
There actually is poverty and precarious life, so aid should be provided, and at the same time illegal use by bosses of immigrant workforces to lower wages should be pursued.
This is pure reality and rational approach. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I am against unlimited overtime work, against blackmarket jobs, and I am all for ordering bosses to pay more! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Thing is, there actually is insecurity,
What, then, am I to make of things when I can look at the statistics and find almost no correlation between how insecure people feel as measured by opinion polls, and how insecure people actually are, as measured by reported crime rates?
What am I to make of the fact that people are more concerned about terrorism than about drunk driving?
I haven't run the numbers, but I strongly suspect that there is a much stronger correlation between the viewership/circulation of Murdoch "news" outlets and fear of crime and terrorism than between actual acts of crime and terrorism and the fear thereof. You may balk at calling this propaganda, but then I'd like to know what it is...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Insecurity in poor immigrant neighbourhoods is more real than that, and the talk was about the fear of people who live there. At least, I am not aware of any stats pointing to a discrepancy between fear and crime rate in that precise case. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
And terrorism is a non-issue. In the last decade we've had what? ten terrorist attacks against civilian American and European targets? Twenty? The median terrorist attack clocks in at a couple of hundred dead and wounded - the mean a bit more, but not excessively so.
Against the next best thing to a billion people.
That's less than a thousandth of a percent mortality and morbidity from terrorism. Influenza kills and maims more people every year because shabby health care systems fail to vaccinate at-risk demographics than terrorism kills and maims every decade.
It's a non-issue.
Now who is leading that debate and producing that type of rhetoric? Ad astra per aspera
Terrorism has been made into an issue by the neocon administration as a way to grab power.
People's voting reasons are more than just street safety. Certain places also became areas where the rule of law is suspended. In these conditions, voting reasons become a more complicate thing than just left/right. We can even discuss the view people have about democracy in certain places. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
And airline safety wasn't high on the agenda in the last couple of election campaigns that I witnessed either, so the attention paid to it seems far more in line with the magnitude of the actual problem.
