Both are actively competing for our attention.
The Tyee is supported by readers like you Let’s begin with BAU, which now boasts a variety of populist variations.
At one level or another, we can all understand BAU’s alluring and simple call to restore greatness and order.
Think of it as Vladimir Putin, Doug Ford, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrew Scheer and Donald Trump doing a rain dance to bring back lost worlds and spent energies.
Or China’s Hong Kong establishment wondering what’s wrong with those young people in the streets.
Or Emmanuel Macron asking what the hell got into those yellow vest people marginalized by globalization and carbon taxes.
The BAU refrain is simple: trust the status quo and its armies of technocrats, because they’ll make things great again.
The BAU crowd maintains that nothing is really wrong with our failing global economic Ponzi schemes or the broken air conditioning unit that controls the climate.
According to the BAU crowd, there is only one route to greatness: we must deregulate and reduce taxes for the rich in order to promote growth and jobs.
The BAU program also encourages citizens to attack its critics, climate migrants, scientists or anybody else who questions the insanity of its approach.
According to BAU proponents, ungrateful people are making it impossible to achieve its real greatness.
That’s one popular denial narrative, and most of the media tends to parrot it. In a technological society, the media builds consent by serving the powerful.
Next comes the Green New Deal. Fashioned after U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt’s economic new deal, the GND says that BAU stinks.