Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

This is worst than right wing drift, it is embracing sheer objective ignorance.

guess I better bookmark this again as well

he's for sure more shit than most right-wingers but imagine how freaked the fuck out france is gonna be next may

let's talk worst case scenario for a few minutes --

in terms of major geopolitical/domestic crisis this will not be as bad as ww2 or the civil war - much more tumultuous, likely far more death and misery at those times. domestic is not going to be great. it's hard to imagine they actually roll back roe v wade but that would obviously be simply terrible. economy likely going to take a major hit almost immediately. europe should probably be concerned about the NATO threats - maybe nat sec industry can impress on trump importance of backing agreements there and in asia. domestic light fascism - ramping up militerization of police - obv major problem. climate change probably fucked but as i constantly hear we're already absolutely fucked so maybe not a huge sea change there.

us AG will OK voter suppression and no democrat will win nationally again

very seriously going to renew my passport and get passports for my kids within the next few weeks depending on what happens tonight. i'm obviously going to wait and see before making any drastic decisions bc there's a range of misery within which it might be worth staying. like if emboldened white supremacists start bombing synagogues that'll probably be my cue - and i imagine v similar warning signs for other minorities who have seen something dark + potentially genocidal lurking behind trump's rhetoric and coalition

I can think of some particular - uh let's call them territories - that Bibi would love to settle 3,000,000 new US olim I'm just saying.

lol

definitely time to renew passports, I have mine but my wife's is expired I think

glad i have mine. i might be moving to d.c. though? what the fuck

i'm so scared right now

France will likely elect a right winger in May but it'll probably be Juppé, not Le Pen.

conservatives not losing grip in england any time soon. i believe in the thesis statement of this thread more than ever.

Feeling a brand new kind of fear and despair this morning

i feel scared

i think we live a very dangerous moment and i don't know if this post-ww2 period of relative equilibrium is going to hold much longer. i hope i'm just being hyperbolic but it seems like we're heading towards some scary times. what i learnt from my great-grandparents was that the bonds of society are tenuous and easily frayed and that when they collapse they can explode in danger + violence. i hope we get through the next few years + are able to minimize what could surely be the worst yet to come.

We've been pretty lucky to have 7 decades of relative peacefulness. This, along with other election results this year, just really shows people don't really give a fuck anymore, because they don't think the consequences will be that bad...

Rome took like 10-15 terrible rulers before it really hit the shitter iirc

i think there will be a lot of hyperbole in the next few days, or accusations of hyperbole and emotional showboating anyway. but a candidate who explicitly positioned himself as refusing to be bound by democratic process (or basic respect for human rights) is about to become Commander-in-Chief of the US military. not sure there's enough hyperbole to cover that.

I'm fairly certain we're not facing Syria or Venezeula and we're not facing 1938 Europe or 1860 America. Which isn't to say things don't look terribly bleak but it does make sense to put it into some context.

the damage will likely not be so dramatic or immediate, sure. but i have a real feeling of not knowing how far this will go or where it can end

I'm more concerned about the Frank Gaffney / Peter Thiel dream team whispering in his ear than Trump himself. I'm not sure this will be a definitive break from GWB, just a horrible magnification of its worst excesses. And we're still dealing with the fallout from the first time around.

The only positive recently has been Polish women showing that if you withdraw your labour from the market, you can stymie parts of a regressive platform. Six million people going on strike forced the government to shelve even more restrictive abortion laws. That kind of tactic might have a value in the US and UK over the next few years.

The only positive recently has been Polish women showing that if you withdraw your labour from the market, you can stymie parts of a regressive platform. Six million people going on strike forced the government to shelve even more restrictive abortion laws. That kind of tactic might have a value in the US and UK over the next few years.

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Wednesday, November 9, 2016 2:04 AM (four seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry if people couldn't be arsed to vote in large numbers against Trump why would they care for such tactics? Life in Williamsburg and in Silicon Valley will continue to be pretty great I'm certain.

People did vote in fairly large numbers against Trump, Brexit, PiS, etc, but not large enough to stop them. The common theme with all of them is that they had enough of the public vote to win but (and I think this will be true of Trump as well) a majority of economically active people voted the other way. They have a power over and above their vote. I don't think it will do much to stop the wider economic programme or foreign policy catastrophes but on single issues it might be effective.

if i thought there were techno-puppeteers whispering into trump's ears that would almost make me feel a little better but i don't think he plans to listen to anyone. i hope ppl in nat sec can prevail on him to not withdraw from the world stage, or that if he does that putin at least shows some resistance. annexing south ossetia we can probably live with. all of ukraine? moldova? one thing that concerns/interests me is that it seems like now, maybe more than ever before in history, there is zero moral authority in the world. if i were a dictator or a fascist or i had a neighbor whose land i coveted or an ethnic group that i thought it would be convenient to ethnically cleanse, this seems like the perfect time to do it. who is going to stop you?

not sure we should hope the type of nat sec people who are likely to have his ear see their suggestions prevail

you want to strike a balance but i'd like some guys in there who are maybe like "hey let's not detonate any tactical nukes in the field that seems like a bad idea" or "you know that torture thing didn't work out too great last time maybe let's avoid that one" or "hey let's just reassure japan and the saudis and maybe dissuade them from getting nukes"

wonder how bibi feels right now. probably nervous. bennett is gonna be knocking on his door in a few minutes asking when they can start annexing area C.

Yglesias bad a sad tweet about the difference between trump and brexit is that brexit at least won a majority

I strongly suspect that someone will sit him down over the next few days and remind him how many of his colleagues depend on the military industrial complex for their seats. The projection of American power is unlikely to go anywhere. How that power is expressed is anyone's guess but I suppose I can forget about doing any business with Iran over the next four years.

ARPAIO OUT

http://www.jpost.com/US-Elections/Donald-Trump/Likud-MKs-react-to-Trumps-victory-in-US-Presidential-Election-472088

After congratulating President-elect Donald Trump, and thanking defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for her friendship to Israel, Bayit Yehudi chairman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett said "the era of a Palestinian state is over."

"Trump's victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause. This is the position of the President-elect, as written in his platform, and it should be our policy, plain and simple," he wrote.

this wolfgang munchau bit has also been doing the rounds

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwzzYmNXEAAN6M8.jpg

The world's most powerful person who is neither an authoritarian nor a nutjob is, as of this week, Angela Merkel. This is not good news.

yeah that is very sobering.

Huntington in 2004

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cw1QafgXgAEI_MG.jpg:large

In the Netherlands Wilders obv gloating about Trump's victory, calling it "another boost in the worldwide patriotic spring". We've elections in March next year. That will be fun :-/

People will fight really hard to hold onto what they have, whatever shitty thing it is.

The Netherlands got overrun by its more powerful neighbor the last time patriotic nationalism got up a big head of steam in Europe.

It's so weird this worldwide international nationalism right I feel like we've barely touched on it but it's obv very real. Is it comparable to Germany Japan and Italy or is this some weird new thing? What do Russian patriots and US patriots and French patriots really have in common? It's really international white supremacism isn't t?

Describing anything this complex as 'just' anything does not feel particularly productive.

Is it comparable to Germany Japan and Italy or is this some weird new thing?

the obvious difference is that this new nationalism seems more concerned with a kind of isolationism, retrenchment, and the like. WW2 Japan, Italy, and Germany were more or less embarking on colonial adventures, no? at the very least the whole "autarky" idea which drove hitler and his ilk is surely a player here but i have seen no desire for expansionism, or securing "lebensraum" or any of that. it would well be that this represents merely an internal momentum that will eventually turn outward but it's hard to say.

i have seen no desire for expansionism, or securing "lebensraum" or any of that.

Russian patriots were mentioned.

failure to integrate restive Muslim populations in Europe is obvious #1 driver, I think. maybe even in US too. there's a strong desire to make this problem "just go away"

not (yet) driven by desire for military adventuring, if anything the opposite

maybe even in US too.

What, all 1% of them?

I thought the US has done an admirable job integrating our Muslim citizens and might have been a model.

(Not to say there were no problems just comparably that the melting pot model might still be resilient)

Possibly because there's so few of them?

i think as this century goes on we're gonna see ever greater pressure put on the distinction (increasingly explicit) between those are afforded the benefits of the security apparatus of the modern nation state and those who will be reduced, essentially, to barbarians at the gate. hope i shuffle off before it gets worse but it will.

Also they seem, from the the perspective of the UK, more middle class. More like the Indian community in the UK. (xp)

on an optimistic note, however, i think we're about to see, in the US at least, a real revival of progressive politics at the grass roots level--trump will have his own version of the tea party to deal with. whether this accelerates the rightward drift or slows it down is impossible to say.