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?
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…
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.
Yes, societies are going through the five stages of grief:
- denial (there are no problems, and if there are, they’re the <insert minority group>'s fault)
- anger (vote for a strongman) <-- you are here
- bargaining (maybe we can partially go back to the better past)
- depression (this sucks, nothing can be done about it)
- acceptance (well, let’s look forward and make the best out of it)
Not exactly. I am old enough to remember wondering why gay couples couldn’t get legal marriage, and when interracial couples were stared at, and the ozone layer had a hole, and the Satanic Panic, but it felt like we were in a shitty spot but moving in the right direction just painfully slowly. Lots more violence than now.
There’s nothing quite like today. There’s things that are similar, but social media has really made things worse.
Populism is rising because things haven’t been great for a lot of people for a long time, and it’s too hard to ignore anymore. Globalism and free trade were massively oversold to the masses, it hurt wide swaths of people that have been ignored for decades. People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.
Social media has escalated everything as well. The echo chambers are enormous and essentially impossible to avoid. Many traditional institutions are also extremely weak now that would have forced more interaction between people with differing views and limited extremism. Social media also does a great job in conflating the size of various groups and beliefs, a few dozen people can make a community seem as large and impactful as a few thousand .
People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.
hahah yeah unfortunately that’s accurate :D
You gotta stop thinking of it as a left/right thing. It doesn’t exist. It’s clouding your perspective. Populists vs establishment might be a better way to categorize if you needed just two groups, but that’s still too simplistic.
The world is a messy place with lots of different groups trying to get power, enrich themselves, and push their ideology. Whatever ideology a group is pushing has little to do with having the moral high ground and will typically result in their own benefit.
Whatever ideology a group is pushing has little to do with having the moral high ground and will typically result in their own benefit.
what little you can do to improve the quality of politics is to educate the people so they can analyze and decide whether the policies are meaningful for common good or not.
There is a good video that explains this kind of phenomenon. First it starts with a political 1D left-right line then ends with a political tesseract.
Important thing is, it is better off to treat it as a spectrum rather than a graph. Because, as implied - complexity.
treat it as a spectrum
a spectrum is typically 1-dimensional as well, though; at least the spectrums i think of
Indeed. It happened in Germany in the 30s. It lasted until the country was utterly destroyed and tens of millions of people were killed.
It wasn’t only in Germany. It first started in Italy as Fascism, and became popular all over the place. As with many Italian inventions, Germans “improved” it and made Nazizm. But they also inspired a lot of similar racist movements, especially around Europe. Captain America was published in 1938 specifically because some comic artists worried Hitler was becoming too popular in USA.
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
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.
You’re probably speaking about a specific country, not the world in general
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.
I assume OP meant fascism that’s directed internally towards the home population. Like Orwell wrote, the way of life of the population at home is predicated on the continued fascist exploitation of non white people abroad.
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.
and they decided they were ok with it because they thought trump would be good for them personally.
nah that’s not what it is, i think. many trump voters knew that trump would hurt them personally but they still voted for him because ideological consistency (or “the long-term good”) is more important to them than not getting hurt within the next four years.
you can see ample proof of this in the [email protected] community, where people actually did and continue to get harmed by trump and would still vote for him again.
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.
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.
So the point of the comment was the relative strength of leftists during the era, not whether/how powerful the fascists were
I didn’t read your “powerful” as an adjective qualifying the fascists, but as one qualifying the countries susceptible to see the rise of fascism, and in the case of Italy, both are wrong.
Also, just like the Danish government nowadays, Mussolini came from a Leftist background and later started applying authoritarian and later totalitarian policies and measures.
Hey! Someone on Lemmy actually read a history book! Thank God.
Strongly disagree. Fascists wave went through the substantial part of Europe, not a “few powerful countries”.
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.
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.
