I don’t mean only the US but in much of the world: in many European countries the populist far right is unseating Christian-Democratic parties (conservative parties), like in Hungary, Slovakia or Czechia. In others like Germany or France the far right is at the gates of power, in the UK, Reform UK is running high in the polls. In Turkey autocratic Erdogan is copying the Putin playbook to systematically dismantle the social-democratic opposition. In Japan, a neo Thatcherite that doesn’t hide she honors Japanese war criminals is about to become the new PM.
Something common I see in all these parties is strong disaffection with the current state of their countries and a longing to an idealized past they promise to bring back, to make countries great again…
Except that societies have changed beyond recognition in the last 40 years, emerging China, India, Mexico and a myriad of south east Asian countries can produce cheaper than us in the developed countries, so called first world democracies are now much older and indebted than 40 years ago (no wonder societies have shifted so hard to the right), buying a house is now waaaay more expensive than 40 years ago, you cannot earn a livable wage just assembling toasters like 40 years ago, you just cannot roll automation and digitization back, no matter how much you complain…
The past cannot come back, neither will it come back just because some people want it to. It’s completely futile, but people are not rational about this, they’re completely emotional and tribal.
It’s like a huge, collective effort in denial: denying that we in the developed world are older, not the first ones in the world anymore, that other countries we always considered inferior to us are even surpassing us technologically while we complain and hope for a savior that brings us 40 years back when we, the white guys, ruled all over.
I don’t see it happening: being angry and voting the far right may make some people feel good, it may make them feel they’re somehow taking their country back, but it’s not going to stop China, India and other countries from developing, investing in new technologies and even creating trade alliances that bypass the US or the EU.
My question: was there a moment in history where societies were so shifted to the right like today? How long did it last?
I think last time this happened a bunch of anti media consolidation laws were passed to prevent rich people from owning everything (unfortunately they were repealed in the 90s in the US) Also taxes, wars. Basically rich people will fund wars to ensure people don’t take their money but in doing so they destroy their money because wars kill workers, destroy products and produce nothing of value.
Its easier just to tax rich people and break up the large conglomorates they’re using to rig everything. Tech companies would need to be included here. Idk why there isn’t a massive tax on all kinds of bad corporate behaviors that lead here: buying companies, mergers, stock buybacks and corporate real estate shenanigans should all have serious taxes associated with them.
We don’t tax those things because we don’t have true representation. Our “representatives” do not work for the people, they work for the rich. Senators, Congressman, SC, and the president should all be put in jail if they are convicted of taking bribes. Unfortunately, we have two separate sets of laws in this country, one for the rich, and one for the poor.
In ww2 Europe 65-75 people had to die before the pendulum swung back. The far right always is responsible for millions of deaths when in control. I think the best prevention would be identifying people with narcissistic and psychopathic personalities and not let them become leaders. We currently reward them in our system
In ww2 Europe 65-75 people had to die before the pendulum swung back.
🧐
They probably meant “65-75 million,” but hey, even the typo is correct as long as you’re talking about a very specific 65-75 people.
Berlin 1939
I’ve been alive for almost 41 years and this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this with my own eyes. All other examples happened decades before I was born. The biggest and, HOPEFULLY, most well know example would be Germany in the late 1930s.
It’s all… perspective and relative ?
The UK oversaw the slaughter of Kenyans in the Mau Mau rebellion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66?wprov=sfla1
The CIA helping Suharto slaughter Indonesians in a genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66?wprov=sfla1
Israel’s existence is becase the US and UK taking native lands
The Kurds were supposed to be free but too much Oil and that was stopped.
Around 80 years ago, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) wrote this:
All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue.
Somewhat more recently, Wendell Berry, in an essay entitled “Word and Flesh”, wrote this:
This statement of Orwell’s is clearly applicable to our situation now; all we need to do is change a few nouns. The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.
The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.” ― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals
We pretend we’ve been anything other then fascist since …? Most (many) German’s in Nazi Germany lived good lives, like most in the developed world have been living.
It lasted most of history. It seems like every time society shifts to the left, it only lasts for a few generations before it dies under autocratic control.
The problem is they’ll always be shitty fascists who think they should be in charge of everything.
And the majority of people only realize how bad that is when they lived thru it.
For an enduring free society, it needs to be a foundational belief that everyone is equal and has basic inalienable rights…
And before anyone says we tried that, their “everyone” was just “white landowning men”.
The problem is that the left, progressives, whatever… are usually more open minded and liberal so they bicker and find nuance in EVERYTHING. Which is nice… But also a massive weakness when it comes to building strong coalitions.
The left is endlessly sub dividing… each group gate keeping harder than the previous… each one more white knighting than the previous with endless, useless infighting.
Meanwhile the right is like “brown people are to blame for everything!”
“Sounds, good here’s my vote…”
😐
yep pretty much. left/progressives have no coherent narrative. just a bunch of sub-groups all trying to co-opt the narrative and bickering over whose group is the most important. and the right just picks the most absurd group an blasts the rest of the left as being part of that group.
A big part of the left was just anti government, when the left got to be government that part broke away. The right got back with the obsession of staying in power. I believe that’s how the left lost so many votes. Not that they do wrong, they just lost numbers.
Evil always gets ahead because it’s willing to do anything to “win.” Good? Not so much. (Well actual good, anyway - not that fake shit that does things claiming their “Good Book” backs them up on it, for example.)
The only reason Good gets control every so often is because Evil is too focused on “winning” & ultimately inadvertently destroys its own foundations in order to do so. Once it figures out how to avoid that, we’re really screwed.
The closest example of that I can think of is China’s current leader. I’ll grant many will somewhat rightly claim he’s done a lot of good over there, but he’s definitely accomplished a fair bit of it through some significant evils.
The difference this time is that the underlying debate is around the definitions of good and evil.
A lot of people over the last ten years have heard about the evil things some people have done and plan to do and gone “yup, sounds good to me.”
I tend to doubt it’s as different as you think. IMHO, the majority of people want good, but are clueless as to what exactly that looks like when it comes to more complex topics like managing the wide variety of people that make up a society. Understanding that usually requires a LOT more time and effort into reasoning things out than they’re willing/able to put in, anyway.
They therefore pick someone to trust who seems (read: cons them into believing) like they know “the truth” to do all their thinking for them. Those arrogant enough to portray themselves as such are almost always malignant personality types interested primarily in manipulating others to do their bidding in order to benefit themselves. They “know” everything, and either are exceedingly unlikely to admit to human failings such as not knowing something, or always have a ready excuse that puts blame upon their enemies for their failings.
They divide people up & pit them against one another to distract, ensure loyalty, and keep control.
Any of this sound familiar? It’s a pattern repeated among humans throughout history.
I dunno about that. You can blame it on right wing media brainwashing or whatever else, but I don’t believe that anyone didn’t know that electing trump was going to bring harm to several groups of people. They knew it, and they decided they were ok with it because they thought trump would be good for them personally.
Yeah, I suppose that’s fair to an extent. The slow burn of Faux Snuz brainwashing and anger buildup definitely contributed as you mentioned, but it is possibly unusual in that the buildup period was so long (Republicans have been working from a basic plan since the mid 70s when some strategist of theirs came to the realization that abortion would be an extremely effective wedge issue) before it reached its peak without anything happening to break that spell.
I’m not really a history buff, so I don’t have a lot to compare to off the top of my head. My argument was based more upon what I know of human psychology - a subject of much more interest to me personally, but which doesn’t have nearly the same amount of documented historical details with which to compare.
Honestly, though, the only thing I think is different today is our level of knowledge and understanding. Data warehousing, statistical analysis, psychological profiling, etc., etc. are all new additions to the dynamic that I strongly suspect have made successful manipulations possible at such as massive scale.
People themselves are still the same as they’ve basically always been - some good, some not, some smart, etc. It’s just now we have the ability to give those in power much more certainly with regards to methods of achieving their goals. Since those who actually desire to be in positions of power are almost invariably the types who shouldn’t have it, the end result is sadly predictably ugly.
Until a war, famine or plague was terrible enough to make people realize that most of their social differences weren’t as important as they thought and they had to rally round an ideal to survive.
Yes, in 1930s. Lasted till 1945.
There were huge countervailing forces then. New Deal US. Soviet Union. Socialist parties gaining power the world over. The rise of fascism was limited to a few powerful countries, not systematic like it is today.
You called 1920s Italy “powerful”?! As an Italian…let’s say I remain baffled.
Strongly disagree. Fascists wave went through the substantial part of Europe, not a “few powerful countries”.
Humans being awful is most of our entire written history. Bill Wurst has the cliff notes:
The powerful made themselves divine deities directly or made up religions where the deity gave them power over others. Conquest, war, rape, tribalism, raids, corruption, oppression, suppression, slavery, spice trade, disease, volancoes causing crop failures and wiping out empires, or causing starving pirate raids who did the same, ice ages causing genetic bottle necks where we almost go extinct, whatever.
You could read David Mitchell’s recent book “Unruly” about the ~1600 years of violent dumb misery following the fall of Rome just in the land whuch became the U.K. if you like. Pretty dry material but he does his best as a comedian to get through it all. It’s a very long list of short lived Kings (and a couple Queens) murdering each other and peasants while the Northerners did the same and eventually settled and interbred and continued murdering each other and living short violent dumb lives. A lot of them aspired to be like a fictional King Arthur. There’s your yearning for past glories. A little like today. It’s not real, it’s fantasy.
Until the printing press and the renaissance, sort of. Temporarily destabilised the powerful. Kinda like the internet. Or radio broadcast I suppose. The old guard didn’t know how to exploit it at first. Printing press fucked up the massively corrupt Catholics at the time, fresh off their crusades and coming up with the idea of paying money to get into heaven. They really hated the idea of peasants learning how to read too. Martin Luther had a bunch of reasons they sucked. One was a complaint about how many little boys each priest kept. Nothing new under the Sun.
Relating any of it to the “right wing” becomes incoherent in a hurry when trying to compare things to modernity. Conservatives are what Royalists became after people kept cutting Royal heads off. Suffice to say though, it was shit fucking awful almost all the time humans have existed.
Looking to the future with climate change in a few hundred years and I expect way more extremism and a lot of death fighting and starving over the dwindling habitable land near the poles.
Eventually the Sun gets too hot even if we were perfect and peaceful and the oceans boil into space. Long before the Red Giant phase swallows the scorched Earth entirely. The end.
Anyways, I’ve deliberately sterilised myself.
This is a big reason why I hated learning history. It is very depressing. I’m always amazed how people can’t seem to understand things they didn’t personally live through. It is a constant cycle of exploitation then revenge on the exploiters and then a new way to exploit.
I’m trying to be hopeful, but it feels like we are in the phase where most need to suffer in order to get to a better place. Climate change is scary, but I try to remember progress can be explosive in ways you don’t expect.
Well this is just delving my own personal musings: I think we’ve evolved to do our best to not understand and bury our collective heads in the sand. Being born with natural critical thinking ability (being driven to seek out maddening truth, rejecting comforting lies) and empathy ability is a rare combination. I think you need both to, as you say, understand things you didn’t personally live through. I mean real understanding, not a cold rote memorisation of facts and trivia to pass a government / post secondary tests.
I love your comment, very frank about it. Thank you!
Appreciated, I’m glad I could write something at least somewhat impactful while being very brief.
This is how I feel about todays politics.
I had to look at this three times to figure out whether it was a troll or not, and I’m still not sure. But ok, I’ll bite.
I’m an American citizen, and while I was a pretty angry neocon as a college student in the early 2000s, I settled down into a much more open, responsive, empathetic conservatism by 2008-2010 or so. And for about ten years, my politics didn’t change a bit. I still voted for smaller government, I still voted against wars (super funny in retrospect), I still voted in favor of my values (which also didn’t change).
But in that timespan, the far right worked themselves into a lather about Obama, a fury that I didn’t (and still don’t) quite understand apart from cable news stoking the fire; yeah, I disagreed with a lot of his policies, but I certainly never wished him dead. To everyone else, though, he was the antichrist. And so I watched as friends of mine went down the rabbit hole, getting more and more worked up and rabid. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015, I thought it was a blip, and we (conservatives) would collectively realize how far off the rails we had gone.
Instead, I got death threats. My kids got death threats. From people who used to be my friends, all because I dared say that I didn’t think Trump was a good choice. And, remember, my opinions and values hadn’t changed over the previous decade or so.
Since then, it’s gotten much, much worse. And, in fairness, I’ve seen how much I had been lied to, even before Trump, and moved over to the left as a result; but the right wing has gone so far over the edge that some of the posts I made on Facebook in 2005-2006—at the peak of my conservative rage, the stuff that was basically just Sean Hannity talking points—I’m seeing MAGAs pillorying Democrats making those same points for being “radical woke communists.” I’m not talking about similar viewpoints. I’m talking about nearly identical wording, in some cases.
So, no. This meme is absolutely bonkers, in a way that’s so obviously backwards as to bewilder, and the best way to prove it is to point out that George W(MDs in Iraq) Bush opposed Trump. MAGA has moved the window of acceptable political thought so far to the right that today’s Democrats sound like 2008’s Republicans, yet they’re being called socialists. Some of MAGA’s “centrists” are actively looking to rehabilitate the words “nationalist” and “Nazi.” “Small government,” “personal liberty,” and “values voters” are considered left-of-center ideals. At this point even Ronald Reagan would’ve been considered a “lefty” to this new-look GOP.
That can’t even be stupidity, no one is that stupid. I’m a 90’s conservative and give me a middle of the road democrat every day.
Edit: click on his name! I don’t feel bad for this guy, but I would like to offer pity to the local ubereats drivers.
Oh fuck off already
It’s the exact opposite of what you’re showing here, and at this point you can’t be that naive to believe what you just posted. Stop trolling
No, that picture is pretty accurate. Im 48 years old. I live in Scotland, Im a left wing socialist. But to Americans, which is a fucking laugh considering they have no left wing party, Im pretty much a nazi. Even though, I havent moved my opinion on any issue in over 30 years.
Social media has made you all insane. You dont have opinions of your own, you the endless chase for up arrows. At best you get your opinions for talking heads on youtube, telling what you think, what to feel about whatever fucking nonsense is making the rounds to get your engaged and clicking. Make no mistake, if being an actual nazi was the popular thing, youd all be doing it. Thats how fucking sad you are.
Heres an example of how fucking exhausting you people are: https://www.gamereactor.eu/amazon-is-removing-all-the-guns-from-classic-james-bond-posters-1612643/
I don’t remember deciding (as a member of the global progressive committee) that Amazon needed to censor James Bond posters. And the page you linked doesn’t indicate the censorship pressure came from any government agency.
It sounds like something a company did for their own reasons. Surely you know this, so why would you blame it on the left, especially in the context of the American left?
I believe you’ve got the political spectrum confused. I’m not sure, as you’re going on about the woes of unregulated social media while actively posting memes as a form of discussion on a social media and then going on to complain about guns being removed from posters, so I’m not too entirely sure what you’re on about. I think I can understand that you’ve got things mixed up, however. The NSDAP, despite their name, was extremely far-right.
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No, Im not talking about the woes of unregulated social media. Im talking about all the spoon eating cunts who cant think for themselves anymore, and repeat popular thing for up arrows. Regulation isnt going to stop dumb people from being dumb.
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The connection between the two, is that you’ve all gone so far off the reservation, you associate the image of a gun on poster for a light hearted action adventure movie as condoning violence. Or worse, removed it because it might be triggering to some people.
I really didnt think it was that hard to follow, but here we are.
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What’s it like being afraid of everything except the police state?
Where did you get that I was afraid of anything?
Must be so weird looking at that meme, and not getting it. Be brave, little toaster, Be brave.
There’s a well understood psychological effect that conservatives are more afraid of things. They’re more driven by fear and disgust. The media uses this psychology to great effect to control conservative leaning people’s thoughts and opinions.
You sounds like such a a chud
Oh, a self own…
Meh now you’re just boring. 🥱 take care now
Dude, not once were you anything but boring. Try getting youre own come backs, and stop copy/pasting generic dog shit from reddit.
The fascist times throughout Europe. It was at a different time in each country.
Before, there weren’t what we would call democracies, but some were democracies at an early stage. Later, people learned to get along with people who voted for other parties.
Then they collectively forgot about that last part.
It ended with guillotines.
No, there is more recent time in 1930s germany
Ends with invading foreign army liberating USians from fascist dictator.
It’s not their responsibility.
Look for the grift in every single country you mentioned, because ultimately, that’s the goal. They want the power and control of money. A narcissist is probably behind every one too. They think they can do it.
I’d say all of history until 1968?
