Jean-Paul Faguet

And with a lag of about 10 years, they realized, wait, we don't have to join these elite political parties led by the rich white people who live in the expensive suburbs of La Paz, we can form our own political parties. And then when they start doing that, it's like, what kind of political party should we have?

And they form it based on the real cleavage that actually defines society, which is ethnic, identitarian, and geographic. Bolivia is a relatively big country by world standards. It's twice the size of France, which is the biggest country in Western Europe. And it's geographically and ethnically very, very diverse.

So then who you are, what ethnic group you're from, whether you're from the highlands or the lowlands or the jungle is the big thing that really matters. And it kind of determines your worldview, not capital versus labor, because there's no labor and there's very few capitalists. And so then a new political party system springs up that's basically that.

And the new divide is basically your ethnic and regional identity.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's true. And so I wrote another paper for like an academic outreach journal called the Journal of Democracy that's trying to speak to the profession, but also to people beyond political scientists.

And what I argue there is that Bolivia, because it was an institutionally weak democracy, but it's subject to many of the same international pressures that we're seeing play out in the US and the current election in Europe, in Britain with Brexit or the rise of the far right in France and Germany and all over Europe.

The same kinds of things, issues to do with immigration and identity, you know, are the migrants a threat to the English identity in the countryside when suddenly you get a bunch of people from Afghanistan or Somalia in little, you know, quaint English villages in the countryside and the people who live there are completely shocked. This is, you know, so foreign to them.

These sorts of things hit Bolivia harder because it's an institutionally weak country and so it's a canary in the coal mine in the sense that we see the effects there first I think in a different form, Brexit, the rise of Trumpism in the US and MAGA republicanism, or the rise of the far right and the collapse of the traditional left in Europe.

The traditional left in Europe is really based on workers' parties and unions. The left-wing parties are tied umbilically to the union movement in the sense that they're financed largely by union-paying members and their dues go to the union and get transferred to the left-wing political parties. And all of that is falling apart.

And it's falling apart for some interestingly similar reasons as to what happened in Bolivia because people work hard in Britain and Germany and France today, but they don't see themselves as a working class. That's not how they conceive of themselves. They don't wear the flat cap, they don't speak with the accent, they don't eat the same food as all the other people who work.

Partly because their conditions of work have changed. You're not working in giant factories that employ thousands or tens of thousands of people where you go to the same place and you clock your card and you work on an assembly line next to 500 or 1000 people who are just like you. So now you're an Uber driver and you think you're an entrepreneur, right? And you're going to get rich one day.

You're an independent businessman who's subcontracting to Uber and maybe you're driving your own car. Maybe you're driving a car that belongs to another entrepreneur, but you don't think of yourself as a working class. And so that left-right politics is in steep decline all over the West. And the question is, what is going to replace it?

And from my point of view, the scary thing, and again, this is linked to Bolivia, is that if it gets replaced by identity, identitarian politics,

Meaning, you know, in Europe, white Europeans who have been there for a long time and are Christian and speak the language versus brown or black skinned people who come from further away, who have a different language, a different religion, different food. If that's what it gets to be about, then this is really dangerous.

In some countries, Protestants versus Catholics is still a really big divide, for example, in countries like Holland, for example, or for that matter, Germany. If politics goes from being left right. So the thing about left right politics is that it's always possible to find a positive, some solution that gets everyone makes everyone happy. because you can expand the pie.

Left versus right is basically about how do we divide profits between the owners of capital and the guys who make the stuff using that capital that makes the profits, the workers.

At the end of the day, right. So as long as we can keep the economy growing, we can give some to the capitalists, some to the workers, and maybe it'll fall apart, but there's at least a chance that we can find a solution because the pie keeps growing. If it's about who you are, then either one ethnic group is on top or the other ethnic group is on top.

And if I can't, you know, if I'm a member of one, therefore I'm not a member of the other, I'm in or I'm out. It's very difficult to find some sort of, you know, agreeable solution to that. Okay, that's a depressing thought. It turns positive sum games into zero sum games. And zero sum games in terms of political stability are scary. Right.

Yeah, that's exactly true. There was actually a fascinating visualization of this done by an undergraduate, I think at Harvard a few years ago, when this began during, I think when Obama was president, when it began to be clear the extent of polarization in the U.S.

And he would just sort of drew little circles and colored them for each legislator in the House and the Senate and colored them by their ideological leanings based on their roll call vote. So they had cast a vote in favor of this or that policy. And from that, he mapped where they were in terms of left versus right.