Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

most revolutions start with a burgeoning but relatively small middle class tbf

not that i'm saying this will happen but, it's rarely a purely "standards of living" thing?

democracy is often a luxury abstract value for the spare-time-having bourgies to get worked up about rather than the rest of us

That has certainly been true historically but idk whether the combined efforts of post-Soviet collapse, Singapore-style autocratic luxury and the ongoing malaise in Western democracy have changed things.

yeah agree the past isn't a reliable predictor here

plus size of the country, differences in political/philosophical/religious traditions etc

This is tangentially relevant:

https://medium.com/s/story/the-singular-pursuit-of-comrade-bezos-3e280baa045c

Amazon as centrally-planned economy and the division between ‘efficient ‘ and ‘good’.

The comparison is irresistible

Trying to make sense of the Italian election, and the Five Star Movement is just as confusing to me as ever. Do they really belong being lumped in with the anti-immigrant/anti-EU parties, or are they something different? They have a strong green platform iirc.

Every country is different, but that is also why I'd put China in more danger of upheaval than Russia/KSA/etc. Chinas development has been based on industrialization and having low wages, and there's a limit as to how much that can continue to improve peoples lifes. Once the wages become to high, the factories disappear, and the infrastructure projects that make up for it are becoming more and more ludicrous. It's not as with Russia, where Gazprom money seems able to both finance a kleptocracy and a rising living standard. Those kind of countries don't seem to go full Venezuela unless they're completely mismanaged.

yeah, we keep waiting for resource extraction economies to shit the bed and they never do

however as a dude once said two hours ago the past isn't a reliable predictor here

and a rising living standard.

citation needed

http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally-planned to a market-based economy and has experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 percent a year—the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history—and has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty.

you can argue about whether or not it's really an improvement to start as an impoverished farmer and then "rise" to a factory worker with 16+ hour shifts making consumer electronics in unsafe conditions. but the textbook "rising living standards" in china, measured by overall GDP and GDP per capita, aren't up for dispute.

think Dan meant re: Russia.

Living standards in Russia tanked after the end of the Soviet Union and have substantially increased over the last ten or twelve years, though have plateaued a bit recently.

oh, my bad, sorry dan!

the chart i was about to post is still relevant, though:

https://i.imgur.com/GDEVQlz.png

i can't bear to post a GDP chart without grimacing, though. hey everyone in the US, wasn't it great how we all doubled our GDP from 1995 until now? we're all doing twice as well as 1995, right??

but it does suggest that perhaps living standards in russia are not quite as stable as some are suggesting.

The 2014 / 2015 rouble devaluation affects USD charts hugely. It doesn’t mean irl domestic spending has been affected so dramatically.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/austrian-state-may-limit-kosher-meat-sales-to-registered-jews-1.6289229

this beggars belief

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/sep/09/sweden-election-live

Fingers crossed!

Having to cross fingers at all is depressing enough.

can't believe there are fascists in Sweden

There's always been a lot of fascists in Sweden.

Probably because they stayed out of WWII, so they never got discredited quite the way fascists did in Denmark and Norway.

https://i.imgur.com/U7Ghu2s.gif?noredirect

Oh, sorry, mistook Noodle Vague for an American.

Exit-polls say SD get's between 16-19%, which is below expectations. But exit polls were wrong last time.

Oh, sorry, mistook Noodle Vague for an American.

― Frederik B, Sunday, September 9, 2018 7:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is... something. Field day for NV.

18% is below expectations, but crazy high all the same. I'd be perfectly comfortable with the hanging of every single one of these yung guns playing politics. With their smug ties. Fuck 'em.

Guillotine, hanging is barbaric.

I don't know, 18% is also the lowest out of any Nordic far-right party.

when peak UKIP were maintaining a steady 12% vote share, it was still enough to push our cuddly One Nation Tories way further to the right and give the legitimate concerns posse in Labour a license to talk casual racism. I don't know how this works in Sweden though, but I presume there will be a similar reaction.

Well, the interesting thing is that that is what happened in Norway and Denmark. When the populists hit double digits, they became perhaps the most influential parties in the country, and now everyone talks about 'legitimate concerns' and a broad understanding of a strict anti-immigration policy. The Social Democrats in Denmark has gone completely insane lately, and just tries to copy everything the populists said. Sweden has done it different, and even though Sweden Democrats hit 12% in the last election, the other parties refused to work with them. The assumption at least in Denmark was that that would only lead to much more people voting for them, and it might look like that is what has happened, but since it's lower than in other Nordic countries I don't think it works that well.

It's really hard to overestimate how much the political world in Denmark loves to contrast ourselves with Sweden. This election has been absolutely ridiculous, everyone seemed certain that SD would get at least 25% of the vote, and there were these completely fabricated stories about how nobody in the debates would talk about a wave of car burnings that happened - it was the very first thing they discussed, the journalists missed the first part of the debate.

So in a certain way to me it underlines how much more crazy Denmark is than Sweden.

was listening to Dimbleby hosted Danish QT panel yesterday. I don't know how representative of Danish society the crowd was, but every time that Henriksen was piping up about burkas or whatever there were boos and hisses.

xp to Calz, 't was the same in the Netherlands, and I imagine it to be the same everywhere. Every party wants a piece of the racist pie if it gets them some votes.

Martin Henriksen is such an... Yeah, even among the populists, he is particularly unlikable. Quite fittingly, he is the guy on the far right:
https://www.information.dk/sites/information.dk/files/styles/700x/public/media/2018/09/06/df2.png?itok=F-qkpM1c

Frederik, what can you tell me about the "ghetto plan" implemented in your country earlier this year? Where 22 areas or suburbs are placed under intense scrutiny and people from those areas can be punished more severely for an offense than people from outside those areas? This "Danish way" was posited and presented as an example by the Dutch conservatives all day. They are looking to Denmark and want to copy and implement this supposed "plan". No one really knows what they mean, though the left opposition called it "postal code racism", which seems otm.

How has this been working out? How is it even legal? I mean, how do you even find judicial grounds to punish person A more severely than person B, for the very same offense, just because person A is from a "ghetto"? (that word, thank god, hasn't entered our political vocabulary yet but I trust it won't be long)

It sounds illegal, ill-informed, abysmal. At best.

It's postal code racism, and it's even worse, because they've changed the definition of 'ghetto' to underline that it is a place with many immigrants. So even if it's poor and crime-riddled; if there are no immigrants, there's no tougher penalties. Yeah, it's abysmal.

That it's apparently technically legal says a lot about how toothless the EU court of human rights is.

the US has been finding judicial grounds for it for a long time, it just isn't codified*

* or codified anymore, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it used to be / is still on the books somewhere

Thanks for your response but I'd like to hear some more about the nitty gritty. Do you have squads going in these "ghettos"? Has a judge sentenced someone from one of those areas already, double the normal sentence? How does this *work*? It all sounds terrifying, but with the conservatives at the wheel here, no doubt it will happen.

And of course the EU court of human rights is toothless, but hey, you can't expect them to jump at every xenophobic instance any of the 27 member states has and act upon it within months. This is on the member states, not the HR court.

@Katherine, it not being codified or written into law is even scarier. But I can't say I'm surprised. Sorry to say but I've stopped questioning if the US has judicial grounds for anything when it allows cops to kill black people as a pastime. There's no codifying that.

It's very new and I don't think it has had consequences in court. It's part of a larger law, which also means that kids from the areas are being forced into kindergarten from age 1, public benefits are lower for inhabitants in these areas (they're already lower for immigrants, so that will only hurt Danish citizens). Lots of stuff like that.

Part of the law also says that the police are allowed to focus especially on these areas. There's been some kind of 'stop and frisk' going on for a while. It's not entirely like in the US since they don't carry weapons and the police squads don't rely on fines, but it's definitely inspired by it.

I'm obviously biased, being from Portugal and having Brazilian friends and so on, but this Bolsonaro guy feels like a special brand of hateful garbage even amongst our current crop of fascists.

Everything about him is in Portuguese.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45579635

Racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted in every other way you could think of, but also openly praises the military dictatorship era and advocates for torture. Has given props to a judge responsible for torturing Dilma Roussoff when she was fighting against said dictatorship and told a female political opponent "I wouldn't rape you because you're not good enough".

He is leading the polls to become Brazil's next president.

Yesssss I have a houseguest right now who heads up an LGBTQ advocacy org in Brazil and she told us some of that last night. He's apparently advocating for civil war that would kill tens of thousands of Brazilians as the preferred way forward.

Correction: Her current job is not in LGBTQ advocacy but her previous ones were, but she's still in policy/advocacy and Bolsonaro is still hateful garbage who might get elected.

I think Haddad should still win a run-off but, post Dilma/Lula, there isn’t necessarily a long-term correlation between being elected and running the country if you are on the left.