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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
The mass of fascism is the working class traitors. The petite bourgeoisie and those who pretend and desire to become that. Of course, they’re going to get shafted later, by the rich fascists.
Egocentric victimhood is linked to support for Trump, study finds
It’s no mystery, it’s the economies. Globalism shipped all of the Blue Collar type jobs to developing countries and kicked off a race to the bottom for wages. The majority of people have suffered a slow reduction in lifestyle for decades at this point and they are tired of it. In this environment the nationalist / protectionist policies espoused by the Right gained traction.
Literally every country that’s having problems with the rise of “Right Wing” politics fits the description.
That’s pretty much it.
Why the far right is surging all over the world
Capitalism is decaying, and fascism is its inevitable conclusion. This isn’t news, either: The Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay
That 1935 piece surely seems prophetic. For example this part:
Development of the anti-scientific and anti-cultural campaign, cutting down of education
For the last five or so years, I’ve been noticing a surge of anti-intellectualism. People are not any longer ashamed to publicly dismiss “smart alecks” and “know-it-alls”.
It’s because in many cases we’ve been told to be respectful and civil to those whose actions and views of us are not respectful or civil. In the United States specifically our fascists have festered and grown slowly and consistently over the last 100 years. We never had a reckoning with our faction of fascists here in the US. So why wouldn’t they have grown.
They make some salient pints but completely skip over the part where the oligarchy use their control of the media to promote these views. A lot of current dissatisfaction is rooted in growing inequality. Then the very people who cause this inequality turn arnd and use it to deflect the blame on minorities that are very much the victims and not in any way to blame for the mess.
It’s been clear for some time that centrists are sick of being screamed at and called nazis by an increasingly noisy far-left contingent.
If you genuinely think the Republican Party are fascist nazis… I mean there is simply no discussion that will be productive.
