Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

The "she's not a fascist, chill" idiocy amongst mainstream right wing types for Meloni seems to me to be a lot stronger than it was for Bolsonaro, Orban, Erdogan - any theories?

Bolsanaro has never tried to hide how much he loved the old military junta whereas Meloni has played down the associations with Mussolini.

Also the ppl saying chill are silly and shouldn't be bothered with.

Maybe because she isn't that different from most of the current Tory Party? Apart from the Catholic bit, of course.

A lot of people are either not experienced with the kind of dogwhistling about family etc or it reads differently coming from a woman due to structural sexism. I think that’s a big part of it, that she is physically small, relatively young and leans hard on that unpolished not-a-politician thing, and also that she knows how to code a lot of her words so that they pass if you don’t want to look too closely = less threatening. She doesn’t look like what people think a fascist looks like.

That makes a lot of sense gyac. But then you could say the same about Le Pen? I guess her family credentials make things more obvious.

I also wonder whether it's a "too close to home" situation, where leaders in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East can be safely categorized as fascists (while still making arguments as to why this is all somehow Fault Of The Left) but a Western European fascist has to be spun as something else.

Also the ppl saying chill are silly and shouldn't be bothered with.

I am not "bothering with them" in terms of taking their opinions seriously, but finding out why centrist stooges take the positions they take can reveal things about the political powers they align with.

Le Pen gets a lot of soft soaping too! She’s been on Newsnight. But yes, family connection and she’s older and doesn’t play vulnerable girlboss.

Aesthetics are a huge part of it for fascists. You’d read people making fun of Nick Griffin’s looks as though that was the thing that mattered.

Farage has got a fair bit of soft soaping over the years, and very rarely does the girlboss thing

Farage is from the same background as the ruling class, it’s no mystery.

also Farage is not really viewed as Not A Fascist anywhere save the UK, while with Meloni I've seen the same sort of opinions coming from voices in the UK, US, France, Portugal.

Latin America, Eastern Europe etc. is just much further away, yes. Most of the ppl wondering as to whether Meloni is a fascist will know of Mussolini. Don't think people have an equivalent for Turkey or Brazil at their fingertips.

Isn't the centrist position one of distance and a hedging one's bets? They'll publish an opinion that will say Meloni is a fascist, or that Meloni is nothing to be afraid of. As long as both are considered. Because there is no immediate danger maybe it's ok to have this kind of debate as it won't knock on their door tomorrow. But if it does they aren't on the wrong side, or so they think.

they would be saying the same thing about le pen if she won power in france

both the national rally & the brothers of italy have pretty direct fascist lineages that their leadership is keen to downplay for the very obvious reasons, but that makes the accusations hit harder & their backers much more defensive about it.

i think orban was offset by having more explicit fascists around in jobbik & being an established political figure who wasn't as explicit about his trajectory until he was already in a position to seriously consolidate power, erdogan's relations with the west have been very rocky, his consolidation of power has been much more gradual, and the western right still often views him with suspicion so they're not anywhere near as inclined to be defensive there, and bolsonaro is much more direct about who he is (though he still denies the far-right label).

farage has also never been very close to directly holding power (so less need for foreign centrists to both-sides him) despite the gigantic influence he's had & he doesn't have the same sort of direct fascist ties as meloni and le pen so there's not the same sort of defensiveness by default.

Among U.S. conservatives I have seen some discomfort with her going after "financial speculators," but only because it sounds Marxist to them. It's basically the anime meme of the guy with the butterfly, pointing to a swastika and saying "Is this socialism?"

(((off topic and uninformed response that is perhaps buying into stereotypes but Italy seems like a good example of an economy that could be revived with management and investment in craftsmanship that is world renowned -- why can't things work better smaller with more intelligent and less wasteful connections between them?)))

The Italian economy is a lot stronger than the UK one fwiw.

Is that right? I think it depends on the sector.

If you broke it down by region both the UK and Italy have vast areas of poverty and very high youth unemployment. Countries broken by deindustrialization and offshoring, and cheaper goods made in the East.

I doubt craftsmanship is the answer either. How many jobs would it deliver?

Yeah my gut feeling is craftsmanship only comes into play when you're catering to semi-luxury products and that's too much of a niche to build an economy around.

(I think spending and value would have to be reconfigured for craftsmanship to matter and to be affordable and to ensure everyone who wanted to and was able to could work.)

I don't know, Italy is always treated as a basket case by the UK media as if this country is so much better. But then they run down everywhere in Europe that isn't Germany or in Northern Europe.

... now we're the basket case!

But then they run down everywhere in Europe that isn't Germany or in Northern Europe.

This is the dynamic of the European media in general (incl self flagellation in Southern countries and superiority complex in the Northern ones).

Modi has also very successfully resisted being called a fascist

In this country, for sure.

I thought Italy already was renowned for exports of high quality food products, fashion, design, luxury cars. Cheap stuff or more quotidian stuff has been offshored but Italian luxury goods are status symbols the world over.

This looks like a good thread on Italian industry

It's hard to explain to a foreign audience what is happening in Italy with Meloni, and how this is possible. But it is easier to understand once you consider this: Italy is the Western country that has suffered the most severe and prolonged economic decline over the last decades.

— Paolo Gerbaudo (@paologerbaudo) September 27, 2022

"Things are in decline, so let's go with the people who led us into outright ruin."

This was an interesting thread about Italian Bengalis

After the UK, Italy has the largest Bengali community in Europe. Seeing the result of the elections makes me worried for what could happen to them. I know many migrated to the UK and this is most visible via the Italian-Bengali cafes dotted around East London.

— Fatima Rajina (@DrFRajina) September 27, 2022

Eater London bait there in the last sentence.

The next European Parliament Elections, Caius Julius Caesar Mussolini (I'm not making it up, it's his name)

Will likely become a MEP pic.twitter.com/C3RcpzRG57

— Italian🇮🇹🇻🇦 (@Italian347) September 27, 2022

British newspaper columnists in unison: If Meloni is such a fascist why do I agree with her about everything? pic.twitter.com/SAOxNaNGbF

— Simon Whitten (@Simon_Whitten) September 29, 2022

She's such a shameful piece of shit

I've been listening lately to the Know Your Enemy podcast, which I find really interesting. And right after listening to an episode from last November about the second National Conservatism Conference, I read this from the (terrible! awful!) Federalist today: https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives/

It basically confirms a lot of things the podcast talked about, that these NatCons are really psyching themselves up for what they foresee as an all-or-nothing real culture war, in which they envision using the power of the state to enforce their versions of Christian morality and stamp out any vestiges of liberalism. Which seems both scary and ludicrous to me, because ... I don't think that will work. But they can obviously do a lot of damage along the way, and already are.

Some snippets from that Federalist piece if you can't bear to give them a click:

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

... The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

... On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

I want to think it won't work, but then I think of the Christian right's successful makeover of the Supreme Court, and I wonder.

Yeah, I don't take their failure for granted. I just think the country they're envisioning is too much at odds with the country we currently live in and that most people want to live in. But lots of bad stuff is coming, that seems a given.

Hence their engineering a permanent minority rule.

One of the things that blows me away, even as someone who is often angry or mad at the state of the world, is how bitter, hateful, and totally devoid of joy a lot of these people are. I know it shouldn't, but it still surprises me.

And by "these people" I mean the fascist scum, obv

Yeah, they're just a bundle of anger and resentment. I think that's one of the biggest reasons Trump appeals to them so much: he's the apotheosis of resentment.

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

It’s Franz, Duke of Bavaria’s time to shine. Would we let him be King Franz I or would he have to anglicize it?

King Frank I

One of the things that blows me away, even as someone who is often angry or mad at the state of the world, is how bitter, hateful, and totally devoid of joy a lot of these people are.

I think that a lot. I'm surrounded by affluent white suburban families who by all measures are enjoying the best standard of living in the history of the species, and whose personal wealth and comfort is not seriously challenged in any way (and here, they live in an absurdly low-tax county in an absurdly low-tax state). And yet they seem so performatively angry, just seething with resentment, and seemingly deriving pleasure primarily from any opportunity to inflict cruelty — rhetorical or otherwise — on their perceived enemies.

They're not loved and respected in the right way, they don't see culture catering to their whims - every sitcom with a Black family or a gay couple is a dagger in their heart, every time their kid makes a video on TikTok set to rap it's a failure they'll never recover from.

I suppose we can lay the blame partly at the feet of conservative media. They figured out in the early 80s that they could supercharge their ratings by portraying liberals as not only wrong, but evil, and an actual, ongoing threat. And, of course, the racism was always just under the surface, until Barack Obama was elected.

Oh for sure, the right-wing media universe is a huge part of it.

The USA is ghost country, and conservatives are right to be afraid when they don't understand or respect any of the history that haunts the worlds they walk through.

people who won’t even acknowledge that the two original sins of this country’s founding are actually sins, or that they even happened the way they actually did. soul rot and mind detergent

In a recent essay for Compact, Jon Askonas argues convincingly that the conservative project failed because “it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit.” Conservatives, he says, were too obsessed with “left-wing revolutionary politics” and missed the real threat, which was technological change so swift and powerful it fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside, and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete.

lol @ the unnameable spectre haunting this paragraphful of jeopardy clues. clicked thru to the compact piece and it quotes marx explicitly, for paragraphs, the ones you'd expect, then just carries on talking about the tradition-liquefying acid of... "technology". not unrelatedly tho it was a pleasure to scroll thru its expensive design.

I took the family out to dinner on Sunday and then they wanted to go to this huge housewares store and I was successful in partitioning to hang back in the car and listen to the football on am radio. Not far from where I parked was this little blue Ford Fiesta parked in the handicap space and on the hatchback window it had these big reflective letter stickers like the ones you might put on a mailbox to put the address stating:

AMERICAN PATRIOT
BORN AND BRED
MAGA REPUBLICAN
GO TRUMP GO

Then it at the bottom it had an NRA and a couple of Marine Corp stickers. Few minutes later this couple of retirement age comes out pushing a shopping cart with some wall hangings. They open up the back seat and put in the stuff and then the guy comes around the side where I can see and he is packing a holster with some type of pistol on his belt. He gets in the passenger seat and then they drive away. Just a normal Sunday out on the town.

When I was 18 I worked the summer in a factory. It was a horrible job and I barely made more than minimum wage but the thing that I remember most about it was how openly antagonistic everyone was. You'd think there would be some class solidarity but nope. People would get on you all the time for dumb shit and they'd always be questioning your work ethic even when you finished all your work early. I remember when someone fucked up an order for the parts and we wound up with literally nothing to do for a week and if you were caught standing around you'd get bitched at for not sweeping the floor for the 27th time. Even if you were in the bathroom for more than a couple minutes someone would accuse you of slacking off. They were also really hostile towards the safety equipment, like I'd get mocked for wearing the gloves and ear protection, or the masks we got when we were working with MEK or other brainkilling chemicals. You should've seen the welder's face, he looked like a piece of Warhammer 40K terrain. As the summer help I'd get a lot of weird verbal abuse too. I remember introducing myself on like the 4th day (nobody talked to me my first few days there) and the guy was like, "nah, you're Willard. You look like a Willard". Admittedly that was kinda funny but everything else was so mean-spirited. Like they took pride in how shitty the job was and (correctly) sussed out that I wasn't really built for it.

Anyway I think of those people whenever I see those morons with the Lets Go Brandon bumper sticker and the "Fu*k your feelings" T-shirt, like all these people care about is their own shit attitude towards life, but they wear it like a badge of honor and just don't want anyone else to have it easier than them. It fucking sucks. I feel like you can pretty accurately determine a person's political affiliation in this country based solely on whether or not they've shown any actual empathy for anyone in a bad situation they're not directly familiar with. Maybe it's always been that way.

well put, Willard