Fast Food and the Political Mainstream

Two interesting items this morning that point in the same direction while dealing with different subjects -- political parties and fast food.

Support for mainstream, established political parties is collapsing in Europe (the same could be said of the United States) at the same time fast-food behemoth McDonald's is losing market share and engaging in a panicked makeover as a “modern, progressive burger company.”

Steven Erlanger addresses the former in the story "As Europe’s Political Landscape Shifts, Two-Party System Fades." A longtime Gray Lady foreign correspondent, Erlanger is presently based in London. His story looks at the May 7 general election in Britain, where Labour and the Conservatives are expected to win less than two-thirds of the vote, requiring the formation of another coalition to govern; but he ranges over the continent as well, providing helpful sketches of the rise of splinter parties in Germany, France, Italy and Spain:

The fragmentation of traditional party voting is increasing all over Europe. Fueled by the last recession and enabled by social media, issue-oriented or protest parties have cropped up everywhere in response to the failure of governments to deliver economic growth and security. The days of a “broad church” party and governments formed by a single party are fading. 

And turnout in national elections has been falling since the 1970s in most Western countries, raising new questions about the health of democracy as multinational corporations and institutions like the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund influence national decisions.

A.k.a., the triumph of neoliberalism:

Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, emphasizes the failure of the European center-left to keep its promise “to create growth and redistribute it to make a fairer society.” With the decline of the manufacturing sector and weaker unions, the left has been forced to buy into the orthodoxy of market economics, which “means their core support has been hollowed out here,” he said, as in France, Germany and Sweden.

“The center-left seems intellectually dead,” Mr. Grant said, little different from the center-right. “So you see alternatives on the far left like Die Linke, Podemos and Syriza,” he said, referring to the Left by its German name.

Meanwhile on the right, he said, politicians and elites are increasingly unpopular, blamed for the 2008 economic crash, the euro crisis, stagnant growth, austerity and the bailing out of bankers.

The combination of low economic growth, high debt, surging migration and increasing anti-Muslim sentiment provoked by terrorism has put the European Union itself under great strain, he said. There is a strong anti-austerity feeling on the left and a strong anti-immigration feeling on the right — and neither issue can be easily managed by national governments or coalitions.

The problem for those of us who are citizens of the United States is that we don't have a parliamentary system of government; instead we have one of the most corrupt, anti-democratic democracies in the world. The mainstream, established parties, the Democrats and Republicans, absent a mass uprising bordering on the revolutionary, cannot be broken. The barriers to third parties and independents are practically insurmountable. This means that the U.S. will not be able to communicate the general will of the people with the growth of a Syriza or a Podemos or a Sinn Féin.

Faced with this type of political stasis, perfectly captured by yet another Bush v. Clinton match-up, people will choose to stay home and not vote. My sense is that there is a little more juice in the GOP right now since they recently had to undergo an emergency Tea Party re-branding when all appeared lost with Obama 2008. So there is a decent chance that Scott Walker will beat Jeb, improving the party's hope to win the White House next fall. As for the Democrats, since they are truly "intellectually dead" and captive to big money, I don't see Hillary being beaten in the primary at this point.

Given the lack of meaningful outlets for people to express themselves politically in the U.S., change is being registered in patterns of consumption. There is a pervasive feeling that something is terribly wrong. We as a species are picking up warning signs, and in response we are choosing to alter what we eat, which is where Mark Bittman's morning column on troubles ("15 percent drop in its United States operating income in the last quarter of 2014") for Ronald McDonald comes in, "McDonald’s Turns ‘Progressive’":

McDonald’s can’t get a break. In the last two months, the company has made several well-publicized big announcements that were widely greeted with yawns or jeers. 

The first was a decision to phase out chickens raised using antibiotics meant to treat humans. The second was to unilaterally raise the salaries of those minimum-wage workers the company directly employs by at least a dollar an hour, granting a small amount of paid vacation time to company employees and financial assistance for education to all workers in its system. And the third was to begin referring to itself as a “modern, progressive burger company.”

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 What McDonald’s should do is go all in and really transform itself, because the effect of positive change would be immeasurable. Instead it tries to play it both ways, controlling what franchisees buy and sell but insisting that it cannot dictate how they treat employees. Thus the wage increase touches only around 11 percent of the chain’s workers, and workers immediately decried it as inadequate. (Even Walmart did better.) No one turns down a raise, but this one virtually guarantees that most of the company’s workers will remain eligible for food stamps, thus perpetuating the public subsidy for McDonald’s labor force.

That the nonantibiotic move has taken this long (Chipotle has tried to be antibiotic-free for more than a decade, as has Panera) and is so incomplete — that is, there’s no word about pork or beef, and the move is being phased in — also seems pathetic. (Even more pathetic is the refusal of the Food and Drug Administration to mandate the removal of nonmedicinal antibiotics from animal production, but that’s another story.)

These moves demonstrate that McDonald’s is hardly a “progressive” company but one that is merely trying in a halfhearted way to catch up with changing market norms and to anticipate inevitable regulation.

If McDonald’s were truly progressive, what would it do? It might revamp the menu in favor of sustainably sourced and fresher food (it’s worth noting that in Britain, McDonald’s uses free-range eggs and organic milk), and might increase its workers’ wages (and hours) to something approaching a living wage.

It may be that the biggest beneficiary of McDonald’s recent moves is the food movement, which, smelling blood, continues to apply pressure. (In response to the raise, some demonstrating workers chanted: “Hey McDonald’s, let’s be blunt/This is just a P.R. stunt.”) And that movement continues to gain credibility as it attends more to the rights of humans than those of animals — not that animals don’t matter, but it’s all relative.

It’s great that McDonald’s blinked. I’d love to see it become a truly progressive company — I’d even help them if I could — but if that’s not in the cards, it would be fine to see a continuing decline in its business. Either would be a satisfactory ending to the McDonald’s story.

The chances that McDonald's will become a truly progressive company are about as likely as the Democrats becoming a truly progressive party. It is not going to happen.