The welfare state as a breeding ground for xenophobia?

Zack Beauchamp has penned an article "No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism" on Vox and it also pertains to the political scenario in Germany with its ascent of the AfD. German politicians and their coattail hangers - they call themselves journalists - were quick to dismiss​ them as racists, populists, demagogues and in even more obnoxious terms. Former SPD leader and guarantor of "SPD at a strong 18% or lower" simply labeled them as 'Pack'.

Meanwhile the German IW has discovered that 'AfD supporters are at the center of society.' 'The AfD is by no means a pool of the Suspects.' This is the conclusion of a study by the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, which is available at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and the FAZ is concerned about the flameout of the new Wunderkind of the SPD Martin Schulz,

How is it possible in a country that is known for a pretty good welfare policy that such a party can generate a sizeable following and even win state elections by an impressive margin?

Trevor Davis has a good summary of Zack Beauchamp's article:

His thesis is very clear: xenophobic attitudes in social-democratic European countries were caused by a “massive, unprecedented wave of nonwhite, non-Christian immigration,” and the economic security of the native population served to exacerbate this racist response because it freed them up to focus on how much they don’t like immigrants. The obvious and inescapable implication is that if people have to spend their every waking minute scratching out a bare subsistence, they will have neither the time nor the energy to become reactionary white nationalists.

The point of Beauchamp’s piece isn’t that welfare-state policies (what he erroneously refers to as “left-wing economics”) aren’t enough, by themselves, to address intolerance — it’s that those policies actively enable and feed intolerant attitudes.

Here are the first paragraphs of Beauchamp's article:

No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

On November 20, less than two weeks after Donald Trump’s upset win, Bernie Sanders strode onto a stage at Boston’s Berklee Performance Center to give the sold-out audience his thoughts on what had gone so disastrously wrong for the Democratic Party.

Sanders had a simple answer. Democrats, he said, needed to field candidates who would unapologetically promise that they would be willing “to stand up with the working class of this country and ... take on big-money interests.”

Democrats, in other words, would only be able to defeat Trump and others like him if they adopted an anti-corporate, unabashedly left-wing policy agenda. The answer to Trump’s right-wing populism, Sanders argued, was for the left to develop a populism of its own.

That’s a belief widely shared among progressives around the world. A legion of commentators and politicians, most prominently in the United States but also in Europe, have argued that center-left parties must shift further to the left in order to fight off right-wing populists such as Trump and France’s Marine Le Pen. Supporters of these leaders, they argue, are motivated by a sense of economic insecurity in an increasingly unequal world; promise them a stronger welfare state, one better equipped to address their fundamental needs, and they will flock to the left.

“[It’s] a kind of liberal myth,” Pippa Norris, a Harvard political scientist who studies populism in the United States and Europe, says of the Sanders analysis. “[Liberals] want to have a reason why people are supporting populist parties when their values are so clearly against progressive values in terms of misogyny, sexism, racism.”

The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration — or, more precisely, it doesn’t do it powerfully enough. For some, it frees them to worry less about what it’s in their wallet and more about who may be moving into their neighborhoods or competing with them for jobs

Full article here.

Matt Bruenig over at Medium adds an interesting observation:

Not keeping diversity down and different groups separated from one another, conservatives maintain, will destabilize society, turn politics into a dangerous racialized contest for political power, and immiserate people in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And it’s not just white conservatives who say this either. The black nationalist/separatist movements also hold these views. This shared political vision is how this iconic photo of the American Nazi Party at a Nation of Islam gathering came about.

His post is well worth a read.