The West was moving to the right — and then Donald Trump got elected again
…
Something is happening among America’s allies, and it’s a tremendous relief. For some years now, we’ve seen the MAGA-infused global right gaining a foothold amongst western democracies, largely driven by the same demagogic, nationalist, pseudo-populism that has fueled Donald Trump’s dominance on the American right.
Some countries like Hungary have served as a sort of experiment for the kind of post-democratic autocracies dreamt of by the modern right wing in which government co-opts, intimidates and de-legitimizes the political opposition to create an authoritarianism that dominates the culture and the politics without a lot of overt violence.
But the rise of the far right among the Western allies seems to be stalling out.
AFD is the biggest party in Germany. National Rally is the biggest party in France. Brothers of Italy is the ruling party in Italy. Reform UK has won a lot of local elections this year.
And as far as I know, the pro-Russian far-right party just won the presidential election in Romania by a large margin.
Support for right-wing parties is larger among young people than among older generations.
I don’t think Trump has postponed Europe’s path toward authoritarian antiglobalism in a meaningful way. I am frustrated about the present situation, and pessimistic about the future.
I’m not even sure what words to use to describe how I feel about those numbers here in Germany. The only way I can see to get out of this is if Trump and his government quickly(!!) “destroy” the US in a major and visible way.
The still ongoing tariff nonsense is one way, but it is not severe enough and Europeans aren’t connecting the dots between one incompetent populist (Trump) and the populists they have at home.
I’ve been hearing about (soon-to-be, if Trump doesn’t back down) empty ports, which may lead to empty shelves in supermarkets. If this becomes big enough that social media is full of people showing empty local supermarkets and the regular media has no choice in turning this into a big story, we might have a chance.
Not that I have any real hope this is would actually change anything …
They will certainly grow if (US) social media keeps dominating voters’ lives. For all the other factors and opposition screw ups, that’s the engine driving their rise.
But yeah, IDK what Salon is on about.
in the future the trope is going to be “I’m going back in time to k— Tr–p” and everyone has to stop them because it would mean the great global awakening would never happen
Something, something, Dune.
He only got reelected because Democrats seemed to care about twenty other things more than the working class. If they can’t figure that out things are only going to get worse. They’ll probably get worse no matter what, the only question is who people will blame. It should be the elite class but they’ll blame poor voters on the other team and nonvoters instead.
Great news for ‘the rest of the world’ but I’d prefer not to deal with this shit here for 4 years as well god dammit.
That demotivator about your role in life serving as a teachable moment to others bites hard
You’re welcome rest of the world. Now be nice to those of us who have to suffer another 4 years.
As long as you voted against him, yes.
If someone said “oh they’re both the same” or “Kamala didn’t make her position clear enough on ______” or any of the other excuses, they need to bear the full brunt of their (in)decision.
I’ve zero sympathy for those fools.
As an European I have zero empathy for genocide voters. If things go south we’ll have to give asylum those those who have a clear track record of not being complicit with the Gaza massacre
I guess kamala voters are out lmao
full brunt of their
(in)decisionstupidity.Fixed it. :3
Very right wing of you to have no sympathy for people born less intelligent than you. Fools should not be blamed. A system that allows fools to be swayed and to be the deciding factor is where the blame should go.
Even the dumbest person knows how to be kind to others. You don’t have to be smart to not want to wish ill upon others.
People vote for Trump purely because they want others to suffer more than they do. If you vote for someone who wants to deport “brown people” then you know fully he won’t be kind to them. If you vote for someone who wants to punish others for doing trade then you know fully well people will suffer. If you think being gay, trans or whatever is a disease and people should be punished for it then there is something very wrong with you.
I indeed have no sympathy for people who voted for Trump. If you voted for him you’re an asshole and just want people to suffer.
Fools should not be blamed. A system that allows fools to be swayed […bad grammar…] is where the blame should go.
While the system bears its share of blame, it is the unquestioning enablers, those who readily consume its dictates, who breathe life into its flaws. Just as tolerance cannot survive by tolerating intolerance, wisdom cannot flourish when we indulge foolishness. To dismantle a flawed system, we must first challenge those who sustain it.
I don’t know. Unintelligent or even uneducated is easy to label the Maga crowd, and certainly many of them deserve that. But not all of them. I know a few who are well educated but just seem racist or 'i got mine" types.
That’s really the crux. There are two trump voters: There are 1) the easily swayed, misled, gullible, uninformed, and other adjectives that imply they are just not fully aware of what is going on; and then 2) the evil assholes who know fully that they are breaking things because they stand to profit from the breakage.
Class 1 deserves our compassion, and should be helped to understand why their choices hurt themselves and society.
Class 2 needs to be evicted from this reality.
Yes there are woefully evil regardless of education. Even if you tried to nurture them with better ideas they’d reject it.
Incels come to mind.
The incels had a choice to listen to reason. They went out of their way to bully. Many ppl vulnerable got affected by this unfairly.
That’s not a stupidity that needs an advocate.
Blaming the system is a cop out. It didn’t happen before, because the electorate held their representatives to some kind of standard. Now, your representatives tell you what to think and y’all just nod your heads like lambs to the slaughter
Be nice to the people threatening to annex and bomb an ally… ? you be nice first.
*Looks at my fellow Brits*
I feel it’s more like a fluke than a rule. We all just got lucky. It’s not like any of us are doing anything to prepare for that next election cycle. But I guarantee you that they are.
I seriously still see mailboxes in my neighborhood with flyers about conservative. They treated the election like they were Punk kids promoting their favorite band around town. They mobilized in ways the left only dream of and they didn’t vaporize when they lost. They will come back more determined
I think that - on a global scale - a fair amount of people has cause to be grateful to Trump. Whether it’s intended or not, he’s tearing down the current geopolitical statu quo and waking up people politically.
On the flipside, I do worry that we narrowly avoided the fire in order to stay in the pan, to subvert the old saying. Over in Canada, we reelected a party that has a lot of flaws, and that their defining benefit is “isn’t the conservative right”. I’m glad we avoided a conservative sweep, but let’s not pretend the shady opposition is significantly better.
Hopefully, Trump and his pals cause other nations to say “The Heritage Foundation is a terrorist organization.” Just because Heritage doesn’t directly kill people, doesn’t change the fact that they will dismantle the world’s universal healthcare, food standards, and more just to make some rich person feel good.
Wish we could have done this before the fucker was elected.
Most people have to learn the hard way. They are dumb like that.
I always say I have to be hit over the head with a frying pan to learn my lesson, but jesus I could tell Trump was not good for America when he started running for his first term.
And now I’ll suffer for it because I’m part of the “parasite” class.
And the Republican Party is obviously a lost cause when they held that CPAC conference in Budapest of all places
Just be happy you aren’t an American, so it won’t be as bad.
:(
And it’s not like we don’t have this history where this failed before
Ironically the crazy economic shitstorm that Trump made might just be the wakeup call the world needed. Hopefully he doesn’t get to reach the whole mass murder stage of his plans.
What might be scary is if America’s Auschwitz moment is revealed to be completely independent of administration. We’ve already heard many stories about ICE during each presidency, just that many details were hidden or unconfirmed.
It was the same way at the end of WW2. Even many Germans were aghast at what they’d been doing at the camps.
Isn’t that a bit problematic to say, though, in essence, you’re implying that Trump isn’t responsible for everything that’s going on, which is a ridiculous claim, because assuming that there is all of this going on, but it was hidden up until now and Trump is only revealing it is not just a conspiracy theory, but a very, very dangerous one.
Just to be clear, I am not praising other administrations. There has been a big problem in USA administrations for a long time. But I wouldn’t dare compare any recent administration to Trump’s latest and even his last administration.
I mean, you have to go where the evidence takes you, even if you don’t like the results. The best thing you could perhaps say about Biden or Obama, was simply that any of their direct participation in border patrol activities followed rule of law.
Generally, CBP/ICE has stayed above much direct scrutiny or supervision, and if an individual doesn’t have reporters, lawyers, or family asking after them (sometimes even then) a lot can be hidden even from administration.
It’s very likely Trump did not do much to “push” ICE’s behavior, he just enabled them, and they reward him by threatening his direct opponents.
Okay, show me the evidence. You are claiming that all trump did was enable them, when he is very clearly and publicly pushing a racist anti immigration agenda. Please show me how this and anyone else in recent years is the same.
Some context:
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o
- https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/03/02/how-border-apprehensions-ice-arrests-and-deportations-have-changed-under-trump/
- https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/3266633/biden-did-not-abolish-ice-not-problem-democratic-party/
The basic idea is, while Trump aims for very visible rhetoric to inflame his racist base, ICE’s presence has still gone up regardless of which president is taking the chair. In fact, Biden beat Trump’s deportation numbers (and I’m sure given his ego, he aims to inflate that further, and finds due process one of his obstacles).
One thing that can be said is that when ICE has been in the news, it was never visibly aiming for cruelty under Democratic presidents. But that’s also only accounting for the cases that we know about. And, the last article points out how even through a full term, Biden not only failed to address the growing worries of cruel behavior within ICE, but built them a new quarter-billion-dollar headquarters.
I can’t speak for all of us, but I don’t think “the world” at large ever supported “Trumpism” and we largely have always thought him to be a gigantic tit and those who voted him into office TWICE to be idiotic or miseducated.
If you replace “Trumpism” with “fascism”, it has clearly been on the rise all around the world for a decade or so now, and it’s taking over more and more countries all the time. However it’s far from clear that we’ve reached any kind of turning point where fascism starts to become less popular worldwide, just because of some fairly limp election results in Canada and Australia.
Fascism. It’s called Fascism, not, “Trumpism.”
So fucking stupid.
At this point, if a news outlet or politician refuse to call it what it is, I assume they actually approve.
So far it’s most of them across the world.
I think a lot of them are afraid of being censored by the fascism for being alarmist. And then trying to hold onto a position of relative power via information is a tricky one, because you have to balance not only your tv station, but the backers, your audience, your managers, your coworkers, your position, your career, and also your life. These people are really REALLY risk adverse, for many different reasons. I’m not justifying it, but I’m imagining this is at least the intuition that some may be working through. Explanation is not justification.
So much for the 4th estate
That’s been gone for a lonnnnng time. Capitalism killed it.
We might actually get world peace, as for peace in America?…
And has the world said thank you, even once?
