Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

I think any economic or political collapse would not be both global and sudden. the global system is too vast and complex.

OTOH, I have no problem believing in a sudden domino effect resulting from climate change. Sea water overrunning Bangladesh rice production, desert areas becoming uninhabitable from the heat. Pretty much anything we're talking about in the global warming thread could bring about rapid change.

This movie to thread: The Act of Killing - 2013 Documentary

xp

"we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath."

Ryan otm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-stone/history-tells-us-what-will-brexit-trump_b_11179774.html

seems plausible tbh

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way  —  all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say, “Oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??” But they don’t realize that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.
An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honor NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

Putin will def press his hand and outsmart Trump otoh he seems smart enough to not risk an actual nuclear exchange which he would have no hope of winning

This is completely moronic for any number of reasons.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

It's on people's radars over here.

It's a shame to pluck one idiotic whimsy from the rest but the leader of Poland thinks every other leader of Poland since independence is a Stasi agent and Putin killed his twin brother. They are literally more anti Russian than Ukraine.

LOL, Poland pro-Russian, that'll be the day!

Even a rabidly right wing Hungary might take some convincing.

here are a few other things I could see happening longer-term worldwide

fair market systems superseded by patronage economies
co-ordinated misinformation campaigns + persecution of journalists
centralization of power, fewer congressional/parliamentary checks and controls
more direct-action environmental movements, maybe even violent ones(?)

If Trump is basically allied with Putin and wants no part in any of this then why would anyone press the nuclear button?

South China Sea maybe

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.

i think i still believe in democracy but as of late it's not hard to see why ppl might find it unnecessary or even harmful

Worth noting that the party that leans anti-democratic in this country is also the one doing most of the gerrymandering and vote suppression.

i.e. a fuller commitment to democracy might actually have prevented a trump win

and a gop congress

As a term, "essential" is pretty open to interpretation tbf. If I were to take that sentence literally, it is pretty clear that democracy is not essential for people to live.

i'm not sure that's relevant since it's tracking a decline over time. however the respondents interpreted the question they think it's significantly less essential now than it was since the 30s.

they got people to say how important democracy is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being "essential", so the way they've formatted the results "people who don't think democracy is essential" = everyone who voted anything from 1 to 9, I think?

so there is a change corresponding with age, but probably less dramatic than it first appears

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

also that doesn't speak at all to the other troubling indicators such as

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

If I'm reading the graph correctly, it's not tracking a decline over time but tracking differences between age groups. 1930s-80s refers to DOB.

(xp)

yep. the graph is saying people born in the 1930s view democracy as more "essential" than people born in the 1980s

for some odd reason

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

I saw someone discussing it on twitter. there's some details on page 7 here:

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf

(um, on page 4 on the pdf, rather. but it says page 7 at the top of the page)

I'm sort of playing devil's advocate, but it could just as easily mean that younger people are more critical and have been less conditioned by Cold War-era experiences and propaganda when it comes to i) how 'democratic' their own countries and the existing international order are and ii) whether the existence of other 'undemocratic' countries is actually going to lead to a nuclear apocalypse that will make life impossible.

I got nothing re Americans' increased appreciation for military rule, though.

because as americans we've been fellating the military steadily ever since 9/11

of all institutions in this country, the military is the only one polling over 30%

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx

Because people don't serve in it.

I am pretty worried about what BRUMPXIT means for democracy, not just because I think Loomis is right about how McCrory is setting the example for other GOP incumbents to follow from here on out, but for the potential loss of faith in democratic systems that all this shit is causing in the young & impressionable.

I guess we'll see which way the pendulum swings on Sunday, when Austria has another opportunity to vote in the first far-right head of state since WWII. I'm not feeling hopeful.

That seventy-year gap seems to be an awfully big contributor to the rise of these sentiments. There's hardly anyone around anymore who had first-hand experience with this shit back in the day. History's boring! Democracy's lame! It's time for something new and fresh and exciting!

I think people's indifference runs a little bit deeper than "ugh, lame". democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

"democracy" is too vague a term to usefully discuss in any detail imo

leaving aside the efficacy of voting, in the UK at least the scope of democracy i.e. the commons has been shrunk over the long term. I think you could make a good case that this has been inversely correlated with increased suffrage - even the likes of peter hitchens agree on this point. ppl sense that most aspects of the world they live in are beyond the horizons of party politics even though this is inevitably downplayed & not reflected by political rhetoric. without regular reform this is inevitable, but as far as I can tell all modern western govts are built more for stability than flexibility.

Is it possible that people who respond that they'd be ok with military rule just have no idea what that means?

It means the military RULES, duh.

democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

yeah when I saw these results I didn't necessarily see it as a popular embrace of autocracy so much as perceiving that "democracy" as currently practiced fails on its own terms

The problem being that so many people who feel that way decide that attempting to fix a broken system has less appeal than smashing it to bits and replacing it with...I dunno, whatever! Because different is always better.

Because the problems are largely caused by power differentials that the existing systems are set up to protect

Austria not going Nazi (yet!)!

https://twitter.com/AP/status/805445655539892224

every election is going to be like this now

Yeah, I felt more relieved about that than I would like to.

http://i.imgur.com/GjnWi8x.jpg

Mr Mahdalik singled out Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, for contributing to the party’s defeat after he said on Fox News on Friday that Mr Hofer would hold a referendum on Austria leaving the European Union.

“That didn’t help us, it hindered us,” he said, saying that an overwhelming majority of Austrians support EU membership.

Casting his vote in his home town of Pinkafeld earlier on Sunday, Mr Hofer ruled out a referendum and said: “I would ask Mr Farage not to interfere in Austria’s internal affairs.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/04/austria-election-norbert-hofer-cusp-becoming-europes-first-far/

Some good news at last.

It will be clearer in the next couple of days what happened, but voter turnout was extremely high. Woman, the young, and pensioners went VdB, men. the less well-educated, and older working people went Hofer. Super clear country-city split as well going the way you'd expect. I personally think that ultimately Hofer went too nasty in his campaigning even for conservative church ladies who think VdB's a communist.