Fascism is on the ballot

[Eric the Green]

(10-17-2020, 06:24 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-16-2020, 04:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-16-2020, 07:19 AM)Isoko Wrote: I agree with you Eric when it comes to millenials in America (and the larger Anglo world such as Britain and Canada). The vast majority of them actually are very defensive and supportive of the new multicultural/multiracial society that has been born. They don't have the desire to return to the past. 

However, millenials in Europe are a different kettle of fish. Aside from some outliers such as Germany and Sweden, I would say the vast majority of millenials in Europe have some form of populist right wing sympathy. Greek millenials are very patriotic and right wing. The majority of French millenials supported LePen with arguments made similar to Classic Xer and CH86. Italian millenials usually vote for the populists. Spain has a growing right wing populist movement and its millenials supporters. Eastern European millenials have views that would not be out of place in 1950s Britain. You get the point. 

Like I said before, Trump would actually be very successful in Europe. I think the reason for this is that the Anglo countries tend to be more defensive of democratic structures compared to Europeans that like to embrace their caesars every so many generations.

"populist" is not an accurate term for these right-wing folk; that meaning of "populism" implies that "the people" at heart are fearful and prejudiced and can be preyed upon to vote their rights away on that basis, whereas the original meaning of the term means power to the people over moneyed and the other elite interests of a few.

Is populist any worse a term than, for example socialist or revolutionary? I remember seeing an image of a billboard in Cuba that extolled "Socialist Revolution -- of the common man, by the common man, and for the common man" in a deliberate use of a key phrase of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on behalf of Castro's "revolution".   

It isn't a bad term, and has much in common with "socialism" in that regard. "Populism" shares concerns with the latter but is less drastic, not necessarily involving as much public ownership and central management of the economy. But socialism is a dirty word in America.

Quote:

Quote:Europe and the USA are different, that is true. Europe has a long Caesar tradition, whereas USA has a long democratic one. Things have shifted a bit though, because the Europeans since WWII and the American Marshall Plan restoration, and especially since the late sixties movements, took the American sixties movements and older democratic traditions and went with them and became more advanced, while America has gone backward in that time. 

America and most of Europe experienced much the same Enlightenment. The difference is that the landed elites did everything possible to protect their class privilege from democracy. European economic elites saw their own power, indulgence, and gain as the definitive expression of the social optimum and sought to limit the Enlightenment to cultural creation in lofty literature, music, and art and to science and technological progress. (It was not so simple in America, where the slave-owning planters whose economic values were feudal). Politics? The economic elites squelched that area of the Enlightenment, and in many countries political change would require revolutions beginning with the French Revolution. The American Revolution came into being before the Industrial Revolution took hold in America, so the American Revolution came before socialism was even a word. The Humanist enlightenment in Europe would largely need revolution or other overthrow to bring an end to the last traces of feudal structure.   

It seems so.

Quote:

Quote:Also, Europe has a much-stronger socialist tradition, and it's not a dirty word there whereas it is in the USA, especially because the USA was the leader of the Cold War and Russia was the totalitarian "socialist/communist" enemy, and because of our self-reliance capitalist ethic. Therefore with all these trends much has been established in Europe of a liberal and left bent, so the generational cycle of returning caesars may not apply. But you may be right that with the millennials it is coming around again, and the immigrant/refugee crisis certainly has stoked it with the rise of LePen, Brexit, the Italian right-wing leaders, neo-Nazis in Germany, and the drift back to authoritarian government in eastern Europe, etc. There is also certainly rising people-power opposition to these trends, as there is in the whole world now. That's true populism.

Populism needs humanism to avoid becoming fascist. America has a "populist" party, but it is very much on the Far Right, much in contrast to the Populist Party that Americans knew in the time of William Jennings Bryan. Socialism needs democracy and the rule of law to avoid degenerating into the Bolshevik-Stalinist-Maoist-Khmer Rouge nightmare. This said, I see tendencies within some libertarian talk that promises (paradoxically) the Marxist assumption that the State will wither away. That's not to say that institutions of the State can wither away without doing great harm to multitudes. I can easily imagine a libertarian society degenerating into a feudal nightmare in which the rich-and-powerful have the dubious freedom of doing to any tenant or employee whatever those rich-and-powerful people want to do.  Needful institutions include courts of law, without which lynch mobs will arise. ...

Populism does not become fascist, but demagogues arise and appeal to fear and prejudice and take our rights away, and elites in the press coin the word "populism" to mean rule by whom they consider the uneducated rabble. The populism of the 1890s continues among genuine populists like Bernie Sanders, who is also a democratic socialist, which as you say is a good combo. Democracy seems implied within populism, as the power of the people, but if the people are riled into a mob by demagogues, then democracy disappears.

Quote:

Quote:So, we'll see. I think if caesarism returns it will be a 4T thing, and that means soon. It may already be too late for the LePen types, since the refugee crisis is easing now. Trump's fall, if it happens, will also take some air out of this movement. A progressive turn in America will influence what happens in Europe once again.

If you think the refugee crisis is bad now, then wait until King Neptune starts confiscating the land of hundreds of millions of peasant farmers with the corresponding reduction in food supplies. Hunger allows no technological fix.

That's true; in the longer run as the climate crisis continues, the spike in the early to mid-2010s will recur in future times. Because of this crisis and others, globalism will of necessity become ever-stronger, and people will need to face the fact of different folks living in their midst and becoming a part of their lives. The Trump-LePen-Brexit projects will become ever-more futile.