Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

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

lol

would you mind defining "woke"?

LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness" pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM

— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023

I love that she's worried about it going viral and it's already on Wikipedia:

In March of 2023, Mandel struggled to define the word "woke" while criticizing it in a viral video interview clip.

Also from Wiki:

During her college years, she adopted conservative views after finding that Medicaid and other government welfare programs she had expected to help her after her mother's death were inefficient and ineffective,[11] objecting to the idea that as someone who had grown up in poverty, she had any 'white privilege,'[3] as well as due to the influence of college friends and the writings of Ayn Rand.

So sure, join the political party that has no ideas what to do when it comes to healthcare.

I always hoped people would do the same thing back when "Social Justice Warrior" was used as a pejorative a few years back. "What is a SJW and why is it bad?"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyFrAktXgAAHy7n?format=jpg&name=medium

AfD not just ahead, but 9 points clear in East Germany (excluding Berlin)

Are those polls or election results?

That should be just a poll, I don't think there have been elections recently. The first word translates to "Sunday question," which I think also indicates that this is a poll.

"Next regular elections in Fall 2025"

Yes, sorry, just polling nothing more than that. I think its the first time AfD have topped 20 nationally, but these are some big rises in the east.

No elections upcoming, think the next is Slovakia with Fico now topping polls

Worthwhile chat on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFf4RCtPfBI

Also gets into the point that a lot of rightwing more visible characters at the moment are just whining cranks and low-effort idiots, but there are others out there who might be harder to counter and the usual dunks won’t work

Well the class struggle is not going to be won by dunks, as enjoyable those may be.

the dunks don't work

so far 2023 has been the year the far right have shifted from "raging at cancel culture" to "using cancel culture to push the Overton window as far as possible" and unfortunately it seems to be working.

the dunks don't work

They just make you worse

feels like Spain dodged a bullet today

The question is, did Vox deflate and PP grow because Spain's right is moving away from frothing nationalism, or because PP has gone frothing-nationalist enough to co-opt erstwhile Vox voters?

feels like Spain dodged a bullet today

otm

Looks more like a stalemate than dodging a bullet, and that they could need new elections a few months from now.

Do we still have any ilxors in Spain? I am curious about the success of the various left groupings... From what I understand through things like a wealth tax, free public transport schemes, guaranteed national minimum income etc etc Spain has avoided the inflation/recession double whammy coming soon to the UK. Feels like making a material difference to people's lives might be a pretty good way of keeping the fash at bay, and something more centre left parties across Europe should take note of?

Yes, it's pretty positive. Believe Spanish government also introduced rent controls. Incredible result given unemployment levels.

Vox got less seats however I have seen tweets saying it was because the right has incorporated their program.

I would strongly advise against checking out the comments on youtube reaction videos to Try That In A Small Town