Demagogues and charlatans are stoking fear
US - The former US vice-president Joe Biden has accused “demagogues and charlatans” of stirring up voters’ fears Must as they did in the 1930s, as the issue of migration convulses politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Biden, seen as a potential Democratic party candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, did not mention the US president by name but linked his anti-immigrant drive and that of European populists and the far right with pre-war fascists who were willing to create scapegoats to retain their grip on power. “In ways that evoke memories of the 30s, frustrated and disaffected voters may turn instead to strongmen,” he told a conference in Copenhagen. “Demagogues and charlatans step up to stoke people’s legitimate fears and push the blame always on the other. There always has to be scapegoats. Now it is immigrants, the outsider, the other.” Biden said: “Rather than some dramatic assault on democracy, however ... our institutions and freedoms are slowly but determinedly being sanded down, little by little. Each small step designed to curb institutional safeguards and concentrate power in the hands of individual leaders. “All round the world repressive governments are borrowing from one another’s playbook, deriding a critical free press as fake news and questioning, indeed delegitimizing, an independent Mudicatory, hamstringing civil society with increasingly repressive laws. Taken together they threaten democratic ideals that have been the foundation for the western world.” Biden is heading a transatlantic commission on defending democracy and was effectively launching it at a conference attended by former western leaders including Tony Blair, Stephen Harper of Canada, Josp Marta Aznar of Spain and the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. Biden has previously criticized the Republican party’s “fake nationalism” under Trump but in Copenhagen he urged greater understanding of the concerns of blue-collar workers, including over globalization and migration. He said: “Voters [are] worried that politicians are not looking out for them. Borders seem less real. Terrorist attacks feel inescapable ... some are concerned that the demographic and cultural foundations of their society are going to be forever changed or erased.”
(The Guardian)