People in those countries are upset about loss of prominence on the world stage and loss of sovereignty to the EU and NATO

So what do we do about it? What sort of regulation would address this? Ban algorithmic feeds? Or maybe we need AI powered bot armies promoting liberalism? Or just flood the zone completely, make all these online channels unusable. I don’t know, but seems urgent.

Most of them were our collation partners in the war on terror. Especially the UK

Orban is just feeding off Hungary being bad at soccer

Maybe they had some terrible water polo performance and that to them was like losing Iraq

Pal Dardai and his sons have really let the world down there.

Right, this is something I've long been curious about. You can tell a story about Europe (the GFC and the absolute clusterfuck of centrist governance in its wake, plus everyone losing their shit about Syrian refugees) and you can tell a story about America (I would center Obama more)...

...but they aren't really the *same* story, and it's a hell of a coincidence Which yeah, does sort of point toward your "it's the internet" theory

Though worth noting that the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is not unrelated to American military adventurism in the Middle East making problems for everyone

The Syrian refugee crisis was only a crisis because Europeans didn't react "hey we are going t get lots of new citizens to supplement our economies" instead of "we are being invaded - abandon liberalism" ... which goes back to the internet

Yes I know lol

There is a timeline where countries respond to natural decrease in population growth by causing crisis in neighboring countries to trigger mass migrations ... and I don't know if it is a darker timeline or not

Convenient that Russia both stoked the migration, & the backlash to it, isn't it?

It’s just the internet. Smart people spend their entire lives being rewarded for attaching dramatically and politically rewarding narratives to history so it’s not surprising to me that we all want to make it a product of US liberalism’s biggest bugaboos but that’s not how the real world works

Lol who said anything about liberalism, all this shit sounds like Dubya's fault to me (Yes, I know who said anything about liberalism, it's the tankies, it's always the tankies)

It’s high-tier truthiness for educated progressives. Many such cases. We all want to live in the apotheosis of all our past correctness

My conspiracy theory since the Syrian refugee crisis is that it was manufactured by Putin to destroy Europe and was enormously successful. I don't completely believe it because it makes Putin an incredible mastermind, but I don't fully disbelieve it either. Putin understands how populations +

react to waves of immigrants (badly) and refugees (even worse). But I also believe it's extremely hard to overestimate the effects of a pandemic.

I don’t wholly disagree. There were a lot of bad actors in overlapping powerful person friend groups whose actions just happened to coincide. The Soros stuff, more or less, can be traced back to one guy that was his neighbor. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsg...

I mean, to the extent the Iraq War destabilized that entire region, causing the refugee crisis in Europe, they're a little related.

Indeed lol bsky.app/profile/hurr...

Printing press, Reformation. Papers and pamphlets, the age of revolutions. Radio and cinema, fascism and totalitarianism. TV, performative entertainment politics. Internet, radicalization. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. It's always the comms tech disruption.

I don't like it!

I hate it! I'm not more generally a determinist! But on the narrower question of why do socio-economic-political stases get disrupted, nine times out of ten it's some leap made on faster and bigger and more disintermediated communications (and transportation, but comms is bigger) possible.

I worked at libraries that had LOTS of Reformation Tracts. The technology was quick--set up your text using 2 racks of type so the pages would come out on a single sheet that could be quickly folded into 8, 16, 24, 32 pages--many were REALLY intense screeds-WHORE OF BABYLON illustrated on every page

Everybody in the 16th c was convinced that they had everything figured out and their opponents were the incarnation of evil. Drawing and quartering offenders reached its peak. Technology definitely affects how people think & behave and it takes time for society to adjust.

It's a big challenge figuring out how to live through to the other side. It's kind of the job of cultural/academic leaders to look for sane possibilities that aren't just holding on to what used to be.

I think the Internet is a fascinating case because (so far) it hasn't taken any longer than those other things to adjust to, but since it speeds up literally every other aspect of communication and culture absurdly, it feels like it's never ever going to happen and we'll be stuck here forever

I'm curious to see whether we'll have a world again where in-person meeting, shopping, communication, etc. is ever so common again, or whether we'll never leave the current paradigm and find some interesting new solutions that satisfy everyone instead

And then one or a few generations later it finds an equilibrium and culture adapts and it gets normalized and then it's like ha, you can you believe they used to smash printing presses, or look at this ridiculous mid-century propaganda, how quaint.

The Arthur Koestler theory of periodic information tech disruptions leading to periodic authoritarian regression, which I am forever quoting

Thanks I hate it

I have… never heard of this??

Lol you should probably get to know it, it sounds up your alley!

It’s from Darkness at Noon (spoken by the narrator, but obviously Koestler’s thoughts), and just look:

Oh I’ve read darkness at noon I just don’t remember that

Incidentally, I wrote about it in the context of newspaper cartoonists (of all things) and the decline of shared political reality here: www.tcj.com/political-ca...

Exactly.

Koestler. That goddamn guy.

Dialect method of human existence

There's a lot going on here, some of it global and some of it national and some of it local. The internet spread reactionary ideas at the same time as those who lived through ww2 were reaching the ends of their lives. The liberal international order had its failures and malcontents.

Population booms, environmental issues, and modern infrastructure caused mass migration. And sometimes This Shit Just Happens. People turn away from the status quo.

Not sure about Brazil, which seems to be recovering from it, but UK, France, Germay all have the usual suspects at work, Murdoch, Russia, and American billionaires.

migrants

It’s the internet but also I wonder if we’ve lost some cultural antibodies to a specific type of far right politics with the passing of the WW2 generation.

I think it has more to do with the later than the former. www.amazon.com/Generations-...

This has *got* to be part of the story, that we lost all the grandpas who spent two years killing nazis. And it fits nicely with the "internet lets nazi ideas spread"

There was a curious thing with the Brexit vote where old people were generally more for it, but the super-old (i.e. people with actual memories of WW2) not so much

so the best way to defeat fascism is to abolish the internet or the very least write algorithms that gets rid of everything political or could cause any form disagreement.In short make the internet boring

yeah the QT is pure junk analysis tbh

It’s social media

📌

I mean, we transformed our info system from ‘couch potato’ (tv) to ‘flame war’ (internet). What did people expect would happen? The US is a bit unique in that talk radio sustained the flames of angry politics somewhat through the TV years and the UK has its uniquely toxic print media

Because shitlibs suck in all places.

Any voter who chooses the far right because they’re “cooler” than the “shitlibs” are way worse in every way than “shitlibs” and should go to hell

It is a sign of a broken, evil population that the far right could win even with the alternative being “shitlibs”

Those who didn’t vote blue when they realize they can’t get a vaccine, Palestine got leveled and turned into a luxury resort and their social security gets taken away And food shortages nationally start to occur

Shitlibs after every election:

“The US should take over and turn Gaza into Riviera of the Middle East” Yes, the response from the left was bad But this was 10X worse, what about food blockages because USAID got cut and they said it was “waste”? Sure the established DEMS suck but republicans are deaf and blind to criticism.

Voters crave change, and if the status-quo shitlibs aren't going to offer positive change, then guess what? Voters will go for punitive change offered by the fascists.

and voters are evil for that then

No one should have to be offered anything to not vote for fascists

You shouldn’t have to get a cookie for not murdering your neighbor

Don't expect the average midwit voter to be smart enough to vote for you automatically. You either give them incentives, or you get out.

The biggest mistake of shitlibs is thinking the average midwit voter always thinks like them. Voters are led by their lizard brain incentives, and it could go either way toward punishing vulnerable groups or punishing oligarchs.

This is not the fault of shitlibs then it’s the fault of voters for being fucking evil idiots

The predecessor government in Germany for much of this period was Angela Merkel, someone who is by no stretch whatsoever a “shitlib”

The preceding government in France during much of the rise of the French far right in the 2010s was Francois Hollande, a socialist

The preceding government in Brazil was led by Dilma Rousseff, another socialist and close political ally of Lula De Silva who was impeached and shortly followed after a placeholder by Bolsonaro

And the government in the UK until basically *last year* was controlled by Tory conservatives for an extremely long period of time. Including during the entire period of Brexit from its proposal to its enactment and dealing with the immediate economic fallout. What are we even talking about here?

Wtf are you talking about? Hollande only served 1 term, and shitlibs served for the rest of the time.

I’m talking about the rise of the French far right, which coincided pretty strongly with reactions to migrants fleeing from Syria. You can make a decent argument for imputing this to Macron’s leadership too but the right benefited similarly to conditions under Hollande and Macron. It wasn’t them.

You can't blame the rise of the far right on a one-term president.

Which is why I don’t. The French president’s ideology had relatively little to do with it whether it was Hollande or Macron. I’m just identifying that “French shitlibs” were not really the cause here and an argument that they are would similarly implicate Hollande, who also governed at the time

Two decade spanning massive anti incumbent wave, its even finally hitting Japan now!

When do we see a real opposition in Singapore that’s what I wanna know

Probably once the Han ruling right wing elite become to terminally online.

She was very much the definition of a shitlib www.economist.com/europe/2024/...

She was a conservative who voted against gay marriage legalization in the 2010s and tried to Herbert Hoover her way out of the eurozone crisis what is your operating definition of “liberal” here that includes not doing fiscal stimmy and opposing marriage equality even after broad legalization?

Germany has a liberal party, and a different communist party to distinguish itself from. That liberal party controlled the government until pretty recently. If she wanted to be a liberal she could just join that party

Yet another problem caused by the U.S. having to shove everyone to the left of Franco into a party that gets defined as the liberal party

Going to Bavaria and telling them they’re actually a bunch of Libby liberals because they don’t vote for AfD

I mean that’s my point

Like many performative leftists, their "operational definition" of a "shitlib" seems to be "person who reminds me of my mom."

I wonder if Merz also reminds me of my mom

Just as "neoliberal" means "any older politician I don't like, based purely on vibes, since I don't actually pay attention to policy." The number of fauxgressives calling Biden a neoliberal, when his administration was quite literally the opposite of that....smdh.

I would much prefer if Biden had been a neolib but instead he kinda aped Johnson (big spending, backing civil rights enforcement and a horrific foreign war) and we lost. So we’re not gonna get another IRA or infrastructure push any time soon.

At least if he’d been a neolib then his loss could discredit Carter-esque neoliberalism instead of capital L Liberal government programs

Biden decided to hang his hat on business-friendly handouts, and he lost accordingly.

Yeah that’s my point instead of an actual spending package that gets businesses to expand clean energy in an unprecedented way in the US the next Democrat is probably going to be a neolib *at best* on these issues. Doing big spending lost, so spend less. Kill inflation. Let unemployment rise

If that's how you want to brand yourselves, go right ahead.

why don't you simply beat the awful shitlibs and enact your vision for society? if they suck so badly

You shitlibs do a good job losing already.

sure, we should be easy to beat. why don't you do that and save us all?

Mamdani showed us the playbook.

yes, he is the new generation of Democrat that I'm very excited about. vote blue no matter who, baby.

And yet they remain superior to the alternatives in all places too

Lol, you are a pathetic, ignorant, dipshit.

trueeeeeee

A lot of people also lost their minds during the pandemic. "Racist pseudoscience such as eugenics also flourished in the post-pandemic years, fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment. “Xenophobia goes hand in hand with pandemics [since] the beginning of time”" www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022...

With regards to the UK, France, and Germany it's a combination of economic stagnation due to post-2008 austerity measures + backlash to migrants In Brazil's case, Latin American countries have had a right-populist problem for awhile now. We can thank American intelligence services for that.

"LatAm is far right because of CIA" You can lay out how economic malaise and racist backlash lead to reactionary movements in the west, but LatAms are all retards with no agency who just go with whatever the CIA says.

Surely, racial dynamics, economic stagnation, & literal communist insurgent groups played 0 role in pushing LatAm to the right 👍 And how are we downplaying the role of social media when Bolsonaro's use of WhatsApp & Telegram were literally a part of the cases against him?

Like fun fact, a lot of Brazilians are white, racist as fuck, and rotted their brains with WhatsApp slop in the exact same way their American counterparts did. This phenomenon is global.

I think you're reading too much into my post and need to calm down

Im not tho. "This country is far right bc USA" is one of the top far left narratives, and its just not true lol. Every society has its native & homegrown reactionaries, and social media has allowed them to capture a larger & larger share of the right leaning population. LatAm is not special.

My point was that the United States backed a lot of right-wing movements and regimes during the Cold War, many of whom were racist, and the effects of this continue to this day

Those regimes lasted often for decades and nostalgia continues today, how did they accomplish this while being foreign transplants? Ridiculous. A lot of white & upper class South Americans are just as racist & reactionary as your MAGA family, or often moreso.

The regimes' legitimacy didn't come out of nowhere. LatAm suffered from economic mismanagement, racial segregation, & left wing terrorism. Their far right wasn't birthed by the US, they are fully homegrown. The US supported these groups largely because they had a chance of siezing power at all.

Like I get the point you're making and agree that the Internet has contributed to it, but a lot of this stuff started before social media induced brain damage became a thing.

The obvious Occam’s razor cause is just the internet, not any American sonderweg theory that sweeps in all the mistakes of past administrations and just so happens to prove that none of this would have happened if everyone had just listened to us before

I’m in the camp that neo-liberal economics/politics is the root cause. Reducing protections and throwing money at the oligarchs is a failure and right now no one except the populists/fascists are proposing an alternative to neo-liberalism. We need someone who is not a fascist to push an alternative

“The internet gives ideologies that rely on mass indoctrination an extraordinary boost by giving propagandists unregulated access to the entire population” is a bad theory in a lot of ways: boring, simple, doesn’t show the folly of US imperialism or neoliberalism. It just also happens to be right

*well resourced ideologies that rely on mass indoctrination. You’re not seeing a massive resurgence in communism, but fascism is on the fucking MARCH.

Yeah and the overlap here is that neoliberals have proven inherently too feckless and inert to effectively combat the fascism

The internet seems too broad, though. It seems more like "a couple large companies depending on clicks driven by fear and grievances, and funneling their profits toward leaders who can grease the skids accordingly"

Like, open access and open infrastructures -- in many things, not just tech! -- seems antithetical to freedom of information, both in receiving and communicating w others. The opposite of that is what we got, which is also the stuff fascists crave

no, I strongly believe it's just the nature of the internet. lowered cost of publishing + huge potential audiences that depend on viral spread

Then why now and not 2002 or 2012

the political fallout is a consequence of the increased fragmentation of the information space which has been getting worse for decades (and not just online - broadcast media too).

media decentralization didn't happen immediately upon invention of the internet, took years for TV and print to decline and digital and online media consumption to become the norm. fifteen years ago Americans were still consuming much more TV than social media, now it's the opposite

yeah I just think "the internet" covers so many things as to be not useful in defining the mechanism for how things got so bad, is all.

you can find prominent corners of the internet not dominated by big for-profit tech firms (e.g., 4chan) and if anything, they're FURTHER along the path of fascist radicalization. the basic dynamics here arise from lower cost of content production and broadcasting, which are a function of the tech

yes but 4chan's scale couldn't radicalize rural, older, or formerly normie GOPers. Seems like it's more *how* it's done now, where social media & its long tentacles can profit most from Epistemic closure's newest insane narratives; fascism's closed systems/resentments are the best fuel for that

Rush Limbaugh plowed the ground that fascists and white supremacists now harvest. At the supply side, venture capital (who keep funding fellow bros) and an ignorant majority of aging elected officials (who can't understand the internet, or regulate it) did their part to make tech billionaires.

a lot of non religious people still think there is someone punishing us for our sins

I am only 14% through Renee DiResta’s _Invisible Rulers_ but I think this is basically what it’s about

I know it feels dramatically unfulfilling that the US was blundering along and then suddenly – BAM! – a new technology comes down that totally changes our politics and makes us all fascist. Like you would never plot a movie that way. None of this was foreshadowed in the first act! But that’s life

More or less the exact topic of a Bulwark video today. "Social media allows authoritarians to activate their base." youtu.be/dp19ZKI2m2w?...

History is not full of inevitable culminations. It is full of blind turns and dead end alleys. Stuff happens, and then it’s superseded by other stuff, and then that is superseded by other stuff still.

Crazy, this is some Quasimodo shit

What do you make of this: bsky.app/profile/pook...

He can't see it, because I block that dipshit

oh I am sorry, I didn't know :/ He's been posting a lot about the effect of media and propaganda, and I thought he might benefit from your insights about it in this thread.

This is closer than 99% of commentaries, but still not quite right. I think the main point is that ‘the medium is the message’ i.e. The turn we are seeing is a function of the nature of communication via social media/internet as opposed to the lack of gatekeepers on the discourse. Splitting hairs 🤷‍♂️

It was also predicted by American History X

Well, if someone c. 1992 had said "nothing good can come of these nerds and their networked machines", maybe

the internet showed the reactionaries that they can all get along; progressives already knew that so we got no advantage.

but as much as anything, it's not that reactionary movements overpowered liberal/progressive ones, it's that they utterly ruined conservatism, and a chunk of neoliberalism.

I think the chunk of neoliberals is especially important here, because of HOW they ruined them. A lot, and I mean a LOT of the global reactionary push is very much around gender anxieties, and that was one of the major issues they used to make inroads with centrist/neolib intellectuals.

Like, the major liberal/center-left parties are basically doing as well as they always have in the US/UK/CAN/GER/AUS, etc. It's the conservative parties that have either been taken over by super-reactionaries or getting pushed by outsiders.

What you do have is some center-left parties trying to move into the gap left by the withdrawing conservatives and they tend to really get their asses kicked in the process.

If anything the internet cleaved progressive coalitions apart more than anything.

Yeah, I don’t know how you could read even three posts on this web site and still cling to any notion that progressives all get along.

all those countries are basically just American vassal states lol

Reactionary politics are not more equally or more prominent in UK, France or Germany than the United States.

reform UK is polling at, in some polls, 35% of the vote. same with RN in France. Germany is the exception in that its the only one who's Far-Right party would have less voteshare than Trump got in 2024

Trump got a lot more than 35% of the vote share? And instead of doing well in polls he actually won, twice. Along with his party. There’s really no comparison. These right-wing western European parties get everyone in a panic and then they flop. The only thing RW populists accomplished is Brexit

I mean that’s two party system first past the post for ya.

Trump won the popular vote, no?

Trump got about 32% of the electorate, if you include eligible voters who just didn’t vote. (The USA typically has about a 40% rate of eligible non voters. )

“Why are the voters of every large wealthy country going insane in precisely the same way” is the defining question of our time. Some of it is internet brain poisoning. Some of it is diversity backlash. Some of it is being mad things are more expensive than they were in 2019.

I live in Texas, but am visiting Canada. As far as I can tell, things are more expensive for me back home. Hands down.

probably because they’re all realizing they don’t have their fair share of the wealth

they didn’t have a fair share in 1980, or 1950, either, and we didn’t see this!

You think the people are turning towards the AfD not because they think vile things about people who don’t look like them but because it’s actually class consciousness?

Trump and Farage and LePen aren’t offering a fairer distribution of wealth though. They’re offering demonization of poor immigrants and if anything an even more oligarchic economy.

They can sell deportation as redistribution

Also the take doesn’t explain why large sections of the bourgeois are moving towards the far right

Reactionary politics exists in all those countries, but they're not nearly as prominent. Come on, now.

fucking Farage's party looks poised to win the next election what are you talking about

Who is the president?

of the united *kingdom*?

Do they have a president?

the answer should be pretty obvious from the word "kingdom"

bsky.app/profile/bern...

... Is this a joke? Are you high? Labor got couped by it's right wing and is currently trying to out-racist Farage while also throwing trans people into the grinder

The UK doesn't have a president, that is basic fifth grade differences of government between countries shit, you really should not be claiming shit like that if you don't even know that

The largest party in the Dutch legislature rn is led by a guy who compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, if you don't see the global rightward lurch you are fucking high And it's not limited to wealthy countries too, we had to deal with fuckin Duterte in my country

What was their share of the popular vote?

in a parliamentary system with proportional representation (i.e. a system where coalitions is what ultimately determines the government)? and, in the netherlands' particular case, a party system notorious for having a *lot* of parties?

The only thing that matters in politics is winning. Trump wins. These Western European parties typically do not have winning track records. PVV couldn’t play ball and they had to leave the govt coalition. Now they are on track to lose seats. There must actually be something unique about the US.

pvv won then blew up out of incompetence, the US doesn't have those kinds of safety valves for an entire party gone off the rails in their system Trump wins elections through his bizarre charisma, but look at his regime rn, I would not call that winning at consolidating power

Is your position that 23.5% is broadly equivalent to 49.8%? Are you a grown up?

that 23.5% formed a coalition with three other parties that got 15.2%, 12.9%, and 4.7% which makes 56.3% in total for the entire coalition

in the Dutch system, with all its infamously myriad parties, yes, actually! Comparing numbers doesn't work to prove your point if you are deliberately ignoring the context of the numbers

About a quarter of the vote but the Dutch system has a lot of parties so directly comparing it to the US system's popular vote totals is apples and oranges

I'd say it's two apples to one orange. Basic numeracy is super valuable.

Right, so if the UK doesn't have a president, do you think there's perhaps another country within the two country comparison (UK and USA) that does?

Is your position that the UK labor party is to the right of Donald Trump and the GOP?

Right now their actions and policies have them pretty fucking close Everywhere is lurching right, just because the US in particular has the craziest and most explicitly neofascist government doesn't make that trend false

So you agree that those politics are more prominent in America, the very subject of my original post?

only by a small margin. You're saying that is "not prominent" in those countries. It absolutely is and just because America posts bigger vote numbers and has a crazier executive doesn't mean the others are not experiencing similar rightwards lurches.

Literacy is great too! I said those politics exist, but are not nearly AS prominent. That is true. You don't even disagree. What are you doing here?

Not nearly as prominent implies that it's not a problem. That it's not comparable. No, it absolutely is comparable. It absolutely is chasing the US's rightward shift. Stancil's point holds - it's happening everywhere.

Because they're really racist and consider a person outside 100 square miles to be a foreigner.