How Far Is Europe Swinging to the Right?
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What we are seeing is an increasing number of people seeing no fundamental benefit of globalization or technology who are simply using their democratic voice to say "hey what about us?"
These are voters who have been completely ignored by the politicians both in the US and in Europe who have been more busy with pushing technology, globalization, outsourcing and insourcing cheap labour.
To confuse this with what we normally consider right-wing is not only getting the analysis wrong but also show why Trump so repeatedly have been underestimated.
In Europe the "right wing" parties have repeatedly been doing better than any poll predicted I expect the same thing will happen in the US with Trump.
They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
Here in the Netherlands people grow tired of the ever growing lust for EU power and the ever increasing amount of EU laws and rules. When we do get a chance to speak out like in the recent referendum about associating with the Ukraine, people's "No" vote is just ignored (like the vote about the EU constitution was ignored). Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia because they impact our economy, they don't like doing business with Erdogan, they don't like TTIP. But people are ignored by the politicians in the middle. So people start voting for less traditional, more polarized right or left (here that would be Geert Wilders, very anti EU) and Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals (oh yes we have that), who are very anti TTIP, bio-industry and globalization.) It just feels like those lefties and righties are better at listening to us and the middle parties are listining to the every growing group of bureaucrats from the EU. Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU and in large corporations.
To me, the EU adds a lot of politicians who are not chosen democratically, and are thus beyond the reach of normal citizens. They are however nicely within the reach of lobbyists.
In the current British debate leading up to the referendum, major campaigners in the 'Stay In' campaign rarely defend the EU, and rather take the line that the UK should stay in the EU despite all it's problems.
What was the turnout at the referendum in the Netherlands?
P: Vote for me! Free movement of labour is great.
C: Why? Then I will face competition from people who are willing to work for very low wages, and so will my kids.
P: Yea, but then you can move to France with your family!
C: Ok but I don't want to move to France. I don't speak the language. My friends and family are here. My kids go to school here. And why would wages be better in France, anyway? I'll face the same competition there.
Can you see why this may not be very convincing? On the other hand, imagine a conversation with the owner of the shop:
P: Vote for me! Free movement of labour is great.
O: Indeed, I'll be able to hire cheaper workers.
I think the better counter argument is brain drain, it's certainly not advantageous for a country if many of its most skilled citizens leave. Personally, I think it's just wrong to build berries of any sort for your citizens to leave the country.
There is plenty of logic of being sceptical when Danes aren't getting jobs at their normal rates because they are being underbid by eastern european workers taking work in their countries while Danes moving to eastern europe won't get the same benefit.
The major problem with the EU is that the expansion towards underdeveloped countries happened too fast.
It's one things when countries are fairly equal, but the difference between the north and the south and the east and the west is quite staggering.
This is all part of why people are skeptical. Both because it's logical to be so and because they are being emotionally afraid about their future.
I think many countries joined the EU for different reasons apart from the ones I have suggested above. Despite all the austerity thrown at the Greeks, Cypriots, and other countries their willingness to stay in has remained as strong as ever - why?
And if the answer is handouts, then I'm sorry I don't think that's the whole story. Greece is now so indebted it'll take generations to solve.
The EU has a directly elected Parliament.
The EU has a slightly complicated executive. There is the Council of Ministers, which proposes legislation and which appoints the Commission. The Council is made up of democratically elected politicians (notably, politicians who do not have a direct personal mandate -- appointees to upper houses, for example, are generally excluded from direct personal participation in the Council). The Commission, which generally implements legislation passed by the Council and the Parliament, is chosen by the Council of Ministers and must be approved by the Parliament.
So the Commissioners are somewhat remote from the voting, but are responsible to two sets of directly elected politicians: those forming national executives, and those directly elected to the European Parliament.
There are plans to have the equivalents of Commissioners directly elected on a pan-European basis, however this requires unanimity among the 28 member-states, and that has not yet been achieved.
There are also plans to have more proportional national-parliamentary representation in a future version of the Council. In part this is because there are broad coalitions and complex national structures in a few member-states. Already there is an expectation that ministers show that they speak for the majority of their national parliaments on key matters (e.g. in formal QMV settings). These rules were adopted by elected politicians in the 28 national governments.
The Parliament suffers from MEPs not being very close to their voters -- the electorates are larger (much larger in some proportional representation cases) and they have less direct influence over purely local and personal matters than national or regional politicians. But they still campaign, and some MEPs are better than others at being close to their electorates.
The Commission has the disadvantage of being responsible to two different bodies: the Council and the Parliament, either of which can remove them. For a variety of reasons, a huge number of MEPs represent non-governing parties strongly opposed to some of their national governments' goals. Commissioners are also often former politicians in the party "opposite" the one in power in their home nation-state. (This is an alternate source of pressure by elected politicians to make sure the Council reflects something broader than the narrow interests of the various governments of the day, to the extent that those are mainly aligned party-wise or philosophically, which is not the case on numerous issues).
Freedom of movement within the EU is something supported by the vast majority of elected politicians across Europe -- in the national parliaments, in the national governments that those parliaments directly choose or support, in the European Council (which is, again, those same national governments), and in the European Parliament (directly elected). Criticism of Freedom of Movement should not really centre on being somehow undemocratic, or at least not more undemocratic than all the member states themselves.
Returning to your question, the Treaty of the European Union requires member-states to guarantee your access to your MEP (representing you where you live within the EU) and to local elected officials (again, where you live) as well as to elected members of the national parliaments in the member-state(s) of your nationality (wherever you happen to live). This is a very active area of European law (there are some cases before the ECJ where the Commission and others are supporting nationals of member-states they do not live in with respect to their right to access to members of parliaments of those member-states) and generally taken seriously.
So the EU is a guarantor of your right to complain to several democratically elected officials about their support for free movement of labour within the EU, and to vote on that basis if you wish (e.g., during EP elections or elections in your home state(s)).
E.g. the EU has for a long time acted as a better guarantor for human rights in the UK than the UK parliaments. But going out and saying people should vote to remain in the EU because it ensures EU law will overrule the elected UK governments on human rights isn't going to help win a majority to remain. It's a bad situation to be in where you have to choose between more devolved power and protection of human rights.
Similarly, free movement of labor isn't big selling point to those who aren't already convinced. Those who aren't already convinced aren't seeing this as an opportunity for them to go out and work elsewhere in Europe, but as an opportunity for people from poorer parts of Europe to come to the UK and take their jobs.
Genuinely curious, when has this come up in the recent past?
The solution should be pretty obvious: let the people of the EU choose the commission directly with their vote.
Any sorry for the sarcasm but "not wanting" and "leaving them to die" is a difference. Of course nobody wants to spend resources on refugees. But if someone prefers letting them die because integration is hard, then this is "right-wing".
As for the Syrians, they'd had to cross something like 6-7 borders before they even reach Poland. It would make just such much sense to ship them to US or Canada or Argentina.
EDIT (probably a clearer way to make my point): Once the Syrians flee from the war zone to for example Turkey, their life is no longer in danger. So, them going from Turkey to Poland is not about saving lives, and cannot be posed as a moral argument.
And regarding Malaria, we should help as well. But that's imply not the point. You making it about this is typical derailing we see from all the right wing populists.
Multiculturalism can work ok in rich and safe bubbles (such as some areas of Berlin), but my guess is that it will break miserably when put under a true test, such as a war. As Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire, it's a scenario we need take into account.
As for the cultural differences, my intuition is that this forum is not that diverse - not in fundamental ways. For example, how many people here condone religious dictatorships or sex with 9 year olds? And these are the kind of people who can settle in my multicultural neighbourhood, if I start letting them into the country.
The refugees we talk about are hardly people who hang out on HN.
Multiculturalism works when there is time to adopt new cultures into your own. Sudden influx is going to create obvious conflicts when the cultures are that different.
And I say that as someone who is pro multiculturalism. But I am not ignorant to the consequences if done too fast.
Given that Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire (well, if you count the Kaliningrad enclave as sharing a border), I question the wisdom of opting out. If you're afraid of a war, I'd be more concerned about making friends than alienating them.
They are generally not fleeing from immediate danger, and they select their target countries of migration based on perceived chances of making a living (by work or by social security) and having a community where one could live (usually one's own countrymen). The perception of where one can make a living is received from often fanciful messages in social media that are of course frequently quite wrong.
On the way, they pass through countries that are safe enough for them to stay. Countries that are safe for anyone to take holiday. Millions of people from EU have holiday in Turkey and Greece each year, for instance. Migrants come through these countries. They are certainly not being killed in Turkey, for instance, but they want more than that.
This doesn't mean that the migrants are bad people. They are looking for a better life, just like any of us would do. They come from many, many countries that are run badly. I can't blame them for wanting to emigrate. And the availability of Internet and improved economical resources and improved connections have made migration more feasible than ever, particularly with the European taxpayer paying the bill at the receiving end through the asylum process.
But the asylum mechanism meant for protecting persecuted individuals is largely being misused in this process. The public perception of the whole thing being a scam is strengthened by well-meaning but unwise poses and statements of politicians that later make them look ridiculous.
For example, thousands of people from Iraq came to my country last autumn. We were told that they were here because otherwise they would be killed. They complained about the food served to them and they complained that they were given too little money by the government. Now a significant portion of them has decided to go back to Iraq. Obviously, they weren't about to be killed back then, nor are they now voluntarily returning to their deaths. They just found that climate is not nice, and there are no jobs for untrained people. So the taxpayer hands out money for them to fly back.
That's what I call ineffective, and this kind of things gets voters mad. Calling these voters "right wing" or "Nazis" is not going to help. They well merely think: "I'm a reasonable person and they call me right wing; I guess the right wing is reasonable people then".
You have any sources for that? I'm trying to imaging someone fleeing by risking their lives and paying with all their savings and then return because they didn't like the weather. This sounds like right wing propaganda to me. And whether people consider themself as reasonable or not doesn't matter. It matters whether they are.
This is why there is an increasing push to add more money to surrounding areas so they can provide better help locally.
It is pretty odd to me to assume that someone who has given up everything and spent all their money to leave, and thus has demonstrated a willingness to go to extremes to get away from their original situation, will cross a border and suddenly decide "hey, no point in seeing if we can get it better if we go a bit farther".
In other words, while I'm sure there are purely economic migrants who haven't suffered all that much hardship who try to take advantage of the refugee stream, it is possible to both be a genuine refugee fleeing for your life and also quite reasonably want to find the best possible place to live once you've managed to get away from the worst risk.
Not least because it is also about dealing with horribly poor information about where they might have the best chances at being allowed to stay.
If we want people to stay closer, then it needs to feel to people arriving in e.g. Turkey, like staying in refugee camps there is a reasonable choice.
A refugees who flees war only need to go to the closest safe area and they are away from the imidiate danger that make them refugees.
Those with most money are those who can afford moving the furthest away.
In most cases it's actually the men who travel all the way to ex Scandinavia and leave their wife and kids behind. They do this because they know they can get them reunited later on.
The people who really have no money are stuck in the nearest refugee camp. I certainly don't hold it against those with the means to try and make a better future for themselves far away from their homelands but that does not mean you just accept everyone.
Then you just end up like Sweden and frankly not even the Swedes are happy about that right now.
The point is not that we should encourage them to go on, but that dismissing those who go on as not really refugees fail to acknowledge human nature.
If you've taken crazy risks to flee, it makes no sense to stop at the very first point where you're no longer at immediate risk of death if you e.g. believe you have a better chance to be allowed to stay in a different country, or if you believe you have better chances at a normal life if you go on. Whether or not those beliefs are right.
I did not suggest we should "just accept everyone". Just that the idea that continuing on is an indication of whether or not someone is genuinely a refugee is flawed.
It's just that then they are no longer in immediate threat of death or persecution (if they ever were) and thus not covered by the refugee conventions.
To counter this, the people smugglers teach (sell) stories to be told to the authorities in receiving countries.
Again, if I were among the migrants, I might very well do the same. Move on, try to adapt, do whatever is needed to be allowed to go on. I've talked to many migrants (mostly young men or boys) and they've almost all been reasonable kids with interesting though sad stories. But they were not being threatened for their lives by the nasty Swedes behind Torneå river whence they came from.
One boy who I invited for a cup of tea after a football training, for instance, was 17. He was born in Afghanistan but moved with his family to Iran at the age of 4. He lived there for almost 10 years, as a second class person (non-citizen, no right to go to school, no proper health care, despised by the locals). Then they moved on to Turkey, then to Greece (which was not nice at all, people were kept in detention), then through Balkans to Austria where he spent a year. Then migration through Germany, Denmark, Sweden. Now he's moved on again, looking for his place in the world.
Not an easy life,but it's hard to say what we really could do to the whole of Afghan diaspora who lives like this. Welcoming everyone isn't going to work, even if I want to be friendly and reasonable to anyone I meet.
I think we mostly agree. Though they would still (assuming they were at one point in immediate threat of death or persecution) be covered by the refugee conventions. It's just that they have no immediate right of asylum or refugee status in countries they subsequently travel to.
This is an important distinction. Someone coming out of Syria that then goes through multiple countries, is a refugee. They don't cease to be a refugee if they travel on to, say, Germany. But the refugee treaties regulates which states are legally obliged to consider an asylum application and which may choose to just tell them "no, you have to go back and apply somewhere else".
The problem, is that these treaties does not take into account human nature, nor do they take into account the tremendous burden they impose on the immediate neighbours of countries like Syria. And so they will not work, and it is not realistic to assume they will work without huge investments in actually making it undesirable to continue on by giving people a reasonable shot at something better closer.
Deutschlandfunk (public broadcasting): http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/rueckkehr-in-den-irak-fluechtl...
Tagesschau (public broadcasting, left-leaning): https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/rueckkehr-irak-101.html
Zeit (most widely read German weekly newspaper, centrist-left): http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2016-03/fluechtlingsk...
Explicitly no right-wing media, far from it in fact.
Of course it is not just the weather, or climate to be exact, but it's a fact that many of the people really had no idea of what the winter is in Northern Europe. Some people adapt, some don't. Particularly if one happened to come to the very North in the winter, the sun rises at 10 am or later and goes down at 2pm or before, and it is cold. Not at all easy to adapt. Some do, many don't.
But along with it there is the realization that unlike promised, there are no jobs that one could take, and all of the receiving population is not as friendly as in the social media clips that feature Angela Merkel or other EU leaders saying "welcome refugees". The food is really different as well, and this is difficult for some people.
So quite a number have decided to go back. These are not rejected asylum applications, these are withdrawn applications. People kiss the ground when they get back to Baghdad.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/finland_flies_103_former_asylum_seeker...
And yes, I do think it is quite a shame that so many people have spent their savings on chasing a dream that was not true. It's also a shame that people smugglers have made fortunes with this. I think they are worse than drug lords, in fact. They are individuals who shamelessly make false promises of an Eldorado and take $5000 or $1000 for a hazardous trip, and actually give advice that gets people killed.
For instance, people in rubber boats en route to Greece or Italy are advised to puncture their boat when they spot the EU sea rescue boats. This is so that they cannot be turned back (as if the rescuers would do that) and they have to be picked up immediately.
So, you bet everything on the card that the rescue boat picks you up. But this instruction does not take into account that the rescue boat may already be full. The boat won't take more than its capacity, so this greedy advice -- which makes sure no one comes right back to tell his tale -- ends up with people floating in the water without their boats. The rescue may take time, people drown or die of hypothermia.
But some people surely make a lot of money out of this. People smugglers, as well as "respectable" corporations that set up, maintain and service the shelters (paid by tax money, run by people with political connections, maintained at the minimum standards.)
- In WW2 polish were often refugees themselves. Something apparently now forgotten. Quick googling suggests that thousands of Polish people ended up in non-Christian countries like Iran (22,000) and India (10,000). - Poland and other eastern Europe are some of the biggest Schengen beneficiaries, that a common asylum system is part of that contract is often ignored. - In the Breit debate Poland is accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants while at home they're anti-immigrant themselves. - Eastern Europe wants military help to defend against a possible Russian threat but ignores how countries like Greece are completely overwhelmed with this crisis.
In the end, the impression one gets is that Poland only wants European solidarity when it benefits them. As soon as it might get expensive for them, they much rather stay out of it. I look forward to the arguments, when the EU goes forwards with linking some of its subsidies to the number of refugees taken in.
Not sure about Poland being Schengen beneficiaries (how to even compute that)? As for Poland profitting from the EU in general, I think it's hard to compute - we are receiving large handouts in exchange for completely opening our markets to western capital - which have crushed 99% of polish businesses, which won't probably ever reach the first-world standards (i.e., due to open market policies, we probably won't ever have something like polish Intel or Toyota,). It's a great deal for western capitalists (their multinational corps get to conquer yet another market), much less so for people of either western countries (whose taxes pay for the handouts) or Poland.
I don't know about Poland accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants, do you have any sources?
The Greece is overwhelmed due to EU's total ineptness in protecting its borders combined with the stupidity (maliciousness?) of EU's leaders, (see Merkel's Willkommenskultur). I agree that we (Poland) are partially responsible for the immigration crisis, in that we didn't call for stronger border defense for EU when the alarming signals started coming (years ago) - but there are countries in EU which are either much more influential than us or much closer to the problem, and they did nothing either.
One last point - the current instability in Syria is rooted in colonial exploitation of the whole region by England and France. Unlike them, Poland never messed those people up, why should we clean up the fallout?
- So the polish people needed favours to liberate their own homeland? That's worded a bit strong but seems like it sums up your argument.
- The schengen point was invalid, I was mixing it up with freedom of movement. My bad.
- For the scapegoating, see this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/1204...
- Calling for tougher border controls is one thing, but what is the alternative? Let people drown in the mediterranean? Leave them in Turkey, a country which already hosts 2 million of them?
- Yes, England and France (and in more recent history the US) have a significant history in that part of the world with ramifications to current events. I think the UKs position in this matter is also complete crap, but that doesn't excuse other countries for not doing anything to help.
However, if you look at the demographics in europe we either need to get better at integrating people from other countries and cultures or we need to get more babies - because there are no other options (barring any sudden development on the AI/Android front). I doubt forcing women to get more children is a viable option. Banning all abortions as Poland tries to is not going to help. This problem may not be as obvious in Poland as it's in Germany, but they're already suffering from brain drain - the young and educated move away from eastern Poland. Things will only get worse - so it's not a question of want or not want. We - as in all of us europeans - will have to deal with immigrants one way or another. And we can do it as unprepared as germany was in the 60ies/70ies or we can learn from that debacle and try to improve on that.
Poland tries to address the fertility issue in a different way - we're letting in lots of Ukrainian migrants (currently there's 500k of them working legally in Poland, with probably another 500k working illegally). They are a much better match, as their language, culture, values and even parts of history are close to ours.
It's incredibly funny how the most liberal worldview currently exposed by a head of state comes from a millennial theocracy.
(Edit: it should be noted, however, that on workers' rights the current Italian government is very much on the right. It's basically a centrist administration with papal influence.)
The real reason they are opposed to EU is not that their politicians somehow shun power, but because humanitarian values of current European legislation are in the way.
It's about fear of change, about being left behind. Not out of choice but out of lack benefit from technology, globalization etc.
They are not benefitting from it so why should they keep voting from it?
They never even consider race. They vote the parties because their lifes are affected negatively what you and i see as opportunity. If you dont understand that you dont understand why trump and right wing increases their supporters and you will continue to fight the wrong battles.
Your remark about fear of change though is quite apt.
The one that affect their personal lives. Jobs, education, cost of living, what they have compared to others.
People looking for simplification, maybe because they are unable to understand more complex situations, tend to go for the shallow, simple-looking, party.
Not necessarily, many of them are fine with Africans, Muslims, Jews and so on (I know I'm lumping race and religion into one here). They just want them to stay in their own country, if they insist of preserving certain parts of the culture. You want a country rules by Sharia that's fine, with most of these parties, as long you don't try to do it in their country.
I mostly view it as how apartheit wanted to be viewed: Tolerance and acceptance of each others culture, but clearly separated, in this case in countries.
It's really that simple. Trump give them hope, let them see themselves again as someone with the potential to be something again.
Bernie basically says. You already lost but I am going to make your suffering a little less problematic.
Trump is specifically popular with men.
Nothing groundbreaking in that.
> They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
No, they are racist. Even if you can explain their racism, it's still racism. There is always some explanation but it's still a move to the right. If you look at the language the AfD is using for example, you realize it's intentionally close to pre-WWII Nazi propaganda.
Or if you insist on you own interpretation. You should instead ask yourself why more and more people buy into that view. The answer to neither of them are racism or fascism.
Just ask the unions. They are increasingly fighting against the cheaper labour in ex. construction undermining the salaries of their own national members.
The left have no response to that what so ever.
Globalization is the problem, technology making jobs obsolete is the problem, natural limits to growth of world economy are the problem, climate change and energy crunch will be huge problems for them soon. But those are hard to explain and much harder to solve, so the idiots win.
Edit: Sorry, I read "refugees" when I saw you mention immigrants. Cheap labour from inside the EU is a real problem.
Stop immigration.
I am sure calling someone an idiot just because they represent another view than you is under your own normal level too.
You aren't an idiot just because you are skeptic towards immigration. National Conservative is a totally fair position to take.
The left ignores them completely. So they are grasping for every straw they can.
The anti-establishment sentiment is so bad that it also rewards whoever shouts the most outrageous things; if you call them out on it, you're obviously part of the establishment.
They are racist, and are being rewarded for racist statements (e.g. Wilders getting a crowd to shout "Fewer Moroccans! Fewer Moroccans!", or Trump's Mexican wall or keeping muslims out of the US).
You are grouping a bunch of very different people into one group the very thing liberals are normally quick to react to when it's done by the right.
You are part of the very reason there even is a right wing.
But each to their own of course.
Globalization is a popular issue because it can also mean that national interests are overpowered by international pressure. But you'll also find resistance for that on the left (because the left never liked globalization in the first place).
Right-wing extremists might have a different meaning in the US, but thats how I think it is commonly understood in Europe.
Thats not a fair way to talk about voting. It's a cheap attempt to try and make a blanket moral statement to render everything else others would say morally wrong.
It's also worth noting that up until now, the American right has focused on limiting the influence of the national government. In contrast, the right wing in Europe has few issues with big national governments. The extreme right in Europe might even want to reintroduce their respective monarchies. That is to say the word "right wing" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. However, Donald Trump seems more in the vein of a European right-winger, which new and surprising in U.S. politics.
The hatred for immigrants/muslims/other minorities is crucial. That's what people are voting for. If they were truly sceptic about globalisation or outsourcing of labour, they would vote green.
And no green and skepticism towards globalization is only skin deep. They don't like pollution and they don't like large corporations who destroy the earth.
But thats not what the "right-wing" voters are worried about. They are worried about jobs. Jobs that the green party wants to destroy by adding taxes to the factories they work in.
So your analysis is simply wrong. Nothing in the green movement is antiglobal.
The so called "centre" has moved away from trying to craft balanced policy without leaning too far one way or the other and have instead chosen simply to serve the hopes and dreams of the political and business elite. They do not represent the left, or the right. They represent a new point on the political spectrum that I see as the new aristocracy.
The racists and facists have always been there. But now that both sides of the political spectrum are rejecting the centre by backing new political movements, they've found a new voice and we can hear them again.
It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein[1][2] makes a really good case for (1) and (2). That has been going on for around 50 years now, since the (end of) Carter and (start of) Reagan administrations. The Democrats lost a 40-year streak of Congressional control to the Republicans in 1992, eventually evolving into the far-right obstructionist Congressional Republicans of today. In the meantime even the liberal Democrat presidents became more conservative on their overall policies (excepting a few social issues like LGBTQ issues) - Obama's healthcare reforms being similar to conservative proposals from the 1980's and Clinton famously saying that the "era of big government is over."
For (3) you have the new executive powers to wage war without Congressional approval (e.g. the AUMF under Bush and Libyan intervention under Obama), bipartisan expansion of warrantless surveillance by both parties (wiretapping under Bush and Snowden revelations under Obama), extrajudicial assassination programs, etc etc. Under the typical US understanding of the terms, this would all certainly be considered "right wing." For the public's part, you see way more widespread support and acceptance for the policies than you did during e.g. Vietnam or even WW2 (opposition to entering the war and the Lend-Lease program, etc).
There has been some occasional reversal towards the center, with e.g. Sanders, Obamacare, Occupy Wall Street, some other examples, but overall the US has been going net right since at least Jimmy Carter. I'd say the opposition to free trade, unless it really steamrolls into something bigger, is currently just another short-term reversal to the center, set against a continual bull market for the political right.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Even-Worse-Than-Looks-Constitutional/d...
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-14/thomas-man...
If this isn't right-wing identity politics, I don't know what is.
These people want racially based geopolitical partitioning. The ones with a diaspora and victimhood narrative certainly advocate for an aggressive "homeland of the x people" where racist law keeps it that way.
My mistake! I know what I described was a Nazi policy but after reading wikipedia, Lebensraum wasn't the name of it.
Thank you for the education and correction
> The "moving to the right" analysis is wrong both in Europa and in the US.
As for Japan, Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party are widely regarded as nationalist/center-right/right both within Japan and without. There's nothing controversial about this characterisation.
The point of of course is that if that is was nazist is the argument, completely ignoring the current context and reality then it's not really worthy of anything but equally retarded attempts to morally paint something s you don't have to actually make a case.
Of course it's true that the Nazis wanted something very close to the EU. It's been used by many opponents of the EU as an argument against it.
But of course it's a retarded way to argue because the current EU is not founded on nazism or nazist ideas.
My main thesis was that most political analysts are wrong in their attempt to make the increasing popularity of the right wing parties a question of racism, fascism etc.
Many of the parties originally gained their support with some of these voters but they have since then mostly developed into being simply National Conservatives.
And so their voters are not so much voting as racist but as skeptics when it comes to immigration especially from countries that are culturally far from their own.
They fear that a continued influx will destroy the culture and their nation. They just want to be left a lone so to speak.
Thats a very different sentiment than the nazis looking out for a specific race to exterminate.
In the US it's up to you to basically take care of yourself from day one.
in the EU you benefit from the social welfaresystem from day one.
In Europe you are made a patient so to speak, in the US you are made a provider. Europe doesn't have millions of people living their under the radar participating in the economy. Instead most immigrants and refugees gets paid by the system.
Further more the US is a big big big continent. Europe isn't yet it has more people than the US.
So this is not about being afraid this is about the rate, the quantity and the cultural change.
I read somewhere that this different means that the US get the 80% most self-sufficient immigrants while EU gets the 80% least self-sufficient immigrants which make sense when you think about the very different demand the US puts on your for self-sustaining your life.
Isn't this one of the themes that make Trump such a successful candidate in the USA right now? There are people who have that have that attitude in Europe and the US (and, I guess, everywhere). Unfortunately, that attitude is on the rise both here and there, AFAIK.
In the original argument you made and which I was answering were trying to make connection between people who vote for right wing parties and nazism.
I am saying that both are retarded argument. Both the one I am responding to which you made and the one I am making.
I am only making it to show how absurd kind of argument it is that you are making.
Call it what you want.
Even that isn't remotely true. The Nazis wanted an empire based on military conquest, with the imposition of the will of the "superior Arian race" on the other "inferior races"; the territories where those inferior races lived should have been colonized by Germans (lebensraum) and the original inhabitants should have become slaves, be relocated elsewhere, or just be exterminated.
Can you tell me which part of this is close to the EU?
Thats the point. Just like the fact that the nazis did have a dream of a unified europe also politically doesn't have anything to do with the EU we see today, the fact that some right wing party was started by someone with nazi sympathy does not mean thats why people vote for them today.
I don't know how to make the argument much clearer to you.
The nazis wanted to "unify" Europe only in the sense that they wanted to annex all European nations and exert unlimited control over them. They weren't interested in creating a European identity, they merely wanted Germans to rule all of Europe (but not make Europeans Germans -- after all Europe was full of untermenschen they wanted nothing to do with).
In other words "unifying Europe" under the doctrine of Lebensraum basically meant conquering more territory for Germans to settle (and enslaving, deporting or exterminating the local population as necessary). Unless you're saying the EU wants to literally do that, the comparison is hyperbolic at best (and defamatory at worst).
Thats what I was reacting to by putting just as ridicules a claim out there.
I am not assuming anything. I am simply providing an argument just as silly as the one I am responding to show how useless that line of argumentation is.
This process is probably the main reason even today Germans tend to be rather averse to warmongering and nationalism. It's only been a few years since Germans have become comfortable with publicly displaying German flags in support of German sports teams again -- the phenomenon was so strange to us Germans that it actually gathered a lot of media attention within Germany.
I'd even go so far as to say that the differemce om Denazification in the American zone compared to the Soviet zone is one of the reasons far-right parties are doing better in former East Germany than in former West Germany to this day (although the economical consequences of the fall of the German Democratic Republic and the lower population density likely play a bigger role).
While Austria was subject to Denazification its role has always been seen as more of a conspirator: it wasn't Austria that created the Third Reich, Germany annexed Austria and made them subject to the Third Reich. That Hitler himself was Austrian is treated as nothing more than an interesting factoid -- after all his rise to power started in Munich, which is in Germany (or at least Bavaria -- which btw has been politically dominated by the right-of-center Christian Social Union for decades) after all.
As a German I can't possibly say what Austrians think of their role in the Third Reich but from a German perspective it seems to boil down to "that thing Germany did and got us involved in". There certainly doesn't seem to be the same level of cultural guilt and political paranoia.
The false narrative in the media is the one where they try to rationalize Trump's rise through the story of poor whites instead of acknowledging their complicity in normalizing his racism and fascism.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...
Congratulations on getting the "cynic of the day" award.
You can't just bring a bunch of muslims who have never been to the west into a liberal christian society and expect it to work out on it's own, the EU has failed miserably on this front, and people are afraid and angry. If you are a poor Eastern European with a wife and a daughter, all you see is that instead of the EU helping you out of poverty, it is brining in people from the east who will rape your wife and daughter and live off of your taxes and then kill you. After the rapes in Germany and the massacres in France, you cannot just tell people "well, shit happens".
To put this into a more rationale perspective: the left wings have failed the people, now the people are starting to turn to the other extreme.
The way I see it: you need a balance between right and left wing.
And it is not correct to say that 'right wing' parties are not racist or fascists. It is, as you know, a spectrum, from the regular, peaceful working person feeling ignored, to the outright neo-fascists and xenophobes. It is a sad situation that this spectrum encompasses such different people.
Until a humanistic right wing emerges to answer peacefully to legitimate demands, present-day right wing parties will keep propagating and mirroring hate and racism.
Since most countries have become two-party systems, what does right/left dictate? social progress vs traditionalism? centralization vs the opposite? equal opportunity vs equal outcome? It sure as hell is not about the economic policies anymore.
The constitutional monarchists and aristocrats sat on the right. Those opposing the monarchy sat on the left.
Through the 19th century, the groups classifying themselves as left grew to encompass (going left to right) anarchists, left-libertarians (right-libertarianism wasn't founded until about a century later), communists and other revolutionary socialists, social democrats and classical liberals (in modern day Europe classical liberals sometimes are considered centre-right).
On the right, the 19th century saw the collapse of support for absolutist monarchies and feudal systems, followed by the start of a splits along religious lines (many European countries have "Christan democrats" competing against usually mostly Christian but not religiously aligned conservatives) and between rural and urban forms of conservatism (e.g. special interest parties targeting farmers or rural populations are common many places), and eventually the rise of right-wing libertarianism and populism.
State involvement or not is a red herring - e.g. a lot of the splits on the left have been about level of state involvement, ranging from wanting to destroy the state completely to wanting a strong state. Similarly on the right since the rise of right-wing libertarianism from the 50's-60's onwards.
Basically you can't make sense of this on a single axis.
Parties like "Dansk Folkeparti" in Denmark is pretty much Social Democrats, except they are harder on immigration. Leaving out the anti-immigration part, I would say that most of these parties are still to the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US.
Claiming an inherent inferiority of a group of people or advocating for a seperate set of laws to be carved out, that's racism. For instance, police profiling or apartheid are real world, dictionary defined "racist" things.
Using offensive language or mentioning someone by they're physical description is not. It's at best rude, but it's not a "racist" act.
On the contrary, racism often comes on the backs of calm language with charts and graphs.
An excellent example would be the Sweden Democrats, where a portion of the party is very much like what you describe, somewhat social democrat. While their youth organisation recently had a hard split due to its leader ship being essentially neo-fascist, which proved to be anathema for the main party.
The USSR was conservative socially and nationalistic.
Those are by no means a sign of being "right wing".
I'm not sure if Orwell actually used the term for the Stalinist Communist Party but he definitely had a problem with their anti-revolutionary stance in, for example, the Spanish Civil War.
I think you've rather reinforced this point.
A common 'improvement' is to have a two-axis system: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
But even this is problematic. In some cases it's purely a historical accident that certain views have been bundled together. There's no innate coherent ideology at work - despite attempts to construct one.
Social conservative is questionable too. The churches were burnt down and the old elites massacred. At the earliest period abolishment of family was seriously discussed (per the tenets of the Manifesto). The shakedowns arguably settled only after 1960s.
It sure was. It tried to play down internal factions of course, but it used to the full such terms as Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ "Great Patriotic War" or РОДИНА "Rodina", and if you look at the propaganda posters, they look remarkably similar to those of the Nazis.
http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/24934238.html
Soviet leadership destroyed churches as the church was a competing power base. But otherwise the Stalinist system was in many ways socially conservative. Look at its attitudes towards homosexualism, or ethos of work morale.
Great Patriotic War and other reversals of Tzarist times (rank system in the army, the concept of motherland etc) did not appear until months into the conflict. Before 1940s you could be hard pressed to find even a mention of "Soviet state", it wasn't really on conceptual radar. After WW2 there were no celebrations of GPW. Not until 1970s when Brezhnev had to create lore for himself: V day wasn't even a holiday.
Propaganda posters had more to do that both were totalitarian, socialist regimes, so there's little wonder.
When my father had his 3 year tour to Afghanistan it was called "serving the internationalist duty". In my pretty average school education there was definite accent on nationalism as an awful thing. So I respectfully disagree.
The USSR was the opposite of conservative - they were extremely progressive. In the attempt to make a new man, they tried to crush all conservative values such as religion, family (with children encouraged to denuonce their parents) or sexual restraint (free love, contraception and abortion were allowed in USSR decades before the West's sexual revolution).
As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
That was also in the revolution's early 1-2 decades.
The USSR turned much more conservative in the 30s and onwards -- including in surprising fields like science. Even arts, which were playing with new forms early one, were afterwards heavily regulated and directed to be towards more classical and petit-bourgeois aesthetic ideals (heroic/lyrical music as opposed to experiments like Stravinsky etc, same for painting etc).
Same for other areas of life -- e.g. homosexuality was soon again an issue, abortion was made illegal again in 1936 (and legal again, but much less touted in the mid-fifties), etc. And of course social norms were encouraged to be conservative and held back, with extra emphasis on hard work, the duty of the citizen, etc. (e.g. Stakhanovites). Most early progressive or anti-family laws were again repealed in the thirties and onwards.
Of course such a regime change also brought some new social conventions and broke some old, like the break with religion.
>As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
The nationalism was for "mother USSR", which was not much different from the great Russia (before and after). Hence the strained relationships with Ukraine or Georgia (still nationalistic under that context).
The establishment in both Italy and Germany originally built alliances with these movements only because they were seen as "better than the reds", because of their nationalism and belief in strong hierarchies (whereas socialists and communists were internationalist and against hierarchies back then). They didn't necessarily like a lot of their social programs.
Leaving out the anti-Jewish thing, Hitler and Mussolini were very much on the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US (today as well as yesterday).
Its historically interesting though that the capitalists were generally supporters of the nazi party, even before the times of slave labour and war time profits. I guess social darwinism was a good match for the capitalist competition mindset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_e...
To summarize: they were initially just called the "German Worker's Party" and had a strong basis in the middle-class. They weren't interested in socialism (i.e. social ownership of capital) but merely in profit sharing (i.e. paying workers better). Their leaders were nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist pretty much from day one -- which is also why they were categorically opposed to communists and other (anti-national or non-nationalist) socialists.
The entire party can be explained as a radical reaction to the fallout from WW1 in Germany: economy in ruins, political lack of power, basically Euro-crisis Greece but significantly worse because everybody hated them and there wasn't an international union trying to fix them.
The reason capitalists liked the NSDAP was that there literally wasn't much capitalisting to do in Germany without first re-asserting Germany's political (and military) power in Europe -- and that's one of the main things the NSDAP tried to do. Though I'm sure Jewish or non-anti-Semitic (remember: before WW2 anti-Semitism was socially acceptable) capitalists weren't too thrilled about the rampant anti-Semitism.
On the very far left everything is totally fair and each person does what they can to help everyone else (in theory). Then you have the more reasonable left, where welfare systems help the less fortunate, because it's the moral thing to do.
As you move toward the right you start to see people wanted to keep what they have for themselves, hence low taxes, and no spending state money no helping others (e.g. Obamacare). Finally in the very far right you have people who don't even want to share their country. They were born there thank you very much and fuck you if you weren't.
The pendulum swings back and forth and this move shouldn't be surprising to anyone who reads history. People who believe in a Fukuyama-style 'end of history' scenario are shocked that nationalism is bubbling up again, but it is a natural correction. Local governance, culture and economy have a de facto legitimacy among people that de jure unions never will.
The Left's challenge is to acknowledge this and help create a framework for a peaceful world of disparate cultures and loose alliances.
It's a kind of fundamental attribution error [1]. People are very quick to blame others for their personal characteristics ie. lazy foreigners (personal), no good scroungers of welfare (personal), instead of the situational context of recession/war/etc. Whereas when it comes to talking about themselves, they're hard working people who just can't get a break (situational), the recession is at fault (situational), no education because my teachers were bad and the school was crap (situational), the foreigners took our jobs (situational)...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It's also globalism. It took jobs abroad and fucked up the working class royally -- and it didn't do much for the middle class either, which is also shrinking. The idea of a totally open market is bad if you also want to secure what you have here and now. Of course it makes big bucks for the rich doing the "opening" part (and keeping the market rigged in 100 other ways), so economists, one of the most whored out "scientific" professions, always sitting next to those in power as advisors, will just blab about how beneficial it is.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...
In my grandfathers era, a working man would have two sets of clothes, one for work and one for sunday best. Nowadays, even the poorest in a western society have a plethora of clothing. That is down to cheap chinese labour.
You can't get round it; if you raise tariffs, you end up with expensive chinese clothes. If you then build your own factories and bring it back onshore, you end up with expensive western-made clothes. The people may have good old-fashioned industrial jobs, but they can no longer afford to live. And that's before you even get into retaliatory tarriffs, where our high-price items suddenly lose half their export market. How much of Apple's revenue growth over the last few years has been from iPhone sales in China?
Yes, and my response was precisely about that assumption, which is really a different issue than economic policies like tariffs for China. This doesn't just apply to the reaction to Trump, but also to the reaction to the (supposed) rise of the right in Europe, the main topic. The assumption that these people are voting like that because they're stupid and racist is going to kill the left.
I know and have debated many people on differing sides of the UK/EU referendum here in England. None of them I consider to be stupid or racist. But they are blaming Europe for all of Britain's woes instead of looking inward. The EU is a net benefit, but just last week we've had otherwise intelligent people scaremongering about Turkey joining the EU and hundreds of thousands of Turkish people swarming the border. It's a crass and absurd lie, and it's downright manipulative.
I never claimed any kind of "psychological pathology" either. That would imply mental illness which is not correct at all. I mentioned a very common human trait which we're almost all guilty of at some point or other.
You seem to enjoy putting a lot of words in my mouth that I never said. I think I'll end this here rather than waste my time attempting debate.
Some places will choose to allow bottles of olive oil on table. Others will will consider it unhygienic ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10076201... ).
The problem comes from trying to merge all cultures instead of considering that there can be different cultures for different places. That would be a better multiculturalism than what we currently call multiculturalism.
I'm just so fed up with dog-whistle politics, of which anti-globalisation is one. ie. You mentioned Trump in the first sentence and then talked about globalisation being the problem, which is usually just a dog-whistle politics talking point for blaming foreigners for everything.
Likewise with multi-culturalism. Usually when people bring that up in a debate, it's followed by some sort of "We must pull up the drawbridge" kind of xenophobia.
I absolutely agree that there are some incompatible cultures out there. The middle east refugee crisis is highlighting quite a few of them. We should absolutely do more to integrate people into our culture when they arrive on our shores. But the solution isn't to say, "your culture, in your place", because as with the refugee crisis, they don't always stay in their place.
The solution is to get tougher on regimes and people that still think these barbaric practices are acceptable.
Ideally we could have a debate about whether it is acceptable for small groups of people to create and enforce local cultures provided people can make choices about whether to participate in those cultures or not. I don't think we are mature enough to do that yet.
As to your first point, calling out dog whistles may be extreme, but it's only a response to the extreme absolutism of public figures calling for "No muslims allowed. No Mexicans allowed. No Chinese goods. Build a wall, etc.".
They could propose sensible options like cultural integration courses. Limited immigration from acceptably similar countries. Maybe even remember the foundational concept of freedom of religion... But while they're still pandering to the extremes, I'll still call it dog whistling.
What the anti-immigration people are actually complaining? Loss of security. Not now, but possibly in the future. Not to themselves, but their families and social groups.
Now if we look at IPCC raports about global warming and speculate what might happen to populations? Probably mass migration. When has that ever went down smoothly? Pretty valid concerns if you ask me. It's just that the timescales are off by few decades. And also some of the most hideous acts in history we're made "to pre-emptively stop X", so they don't really get my support.
Take the climate change induced migration example; having millions of starving desperate people on the other side of a wall (literal or metaphorical), is not going to be a pretty situation. It's the classic philosophy problem: If your child is starving to death, would you steal a loaf of bread? Or would you watch them die?
By building walls, you're forcing that decision on millions of refugees. Would you blame anyone for their actions in such a situation? By pushing people away we're only kicking the can down the road, it will only ever get worse. Whereas if we show compassion and show them how great our society is, maybe they'll realise that it's our way of life that gives us these good things. It's hard to call someone the devil when they're being nice to you. When was the last time we were nice to anyone in the middle east outside Israel?
There is 2000km between Germany and Syria. People in Syria are different group than desendants of Syrians in Germany. German govermnent is different than most individual native germans. Nobody has to abide by any rules or agreements, it just happens that currently some rules make sense for large majority. For now. Someone being nice to someone else doesn't exactly guarantee anything to anybody else.
I think the walls are completely meaningless in every sense. They don't make anybody terrorist, refugee or safe.
Compassion might just as well show them that we are foolish. Violence might just show them that we have loot to protect. It's hard to call someone devil when they are nice to you, but it's still relatively easy to be asshole yourself.
I advocate pretty much just two things. Dropping less bombs to middle east and cutting social security form refugees. That should fight the root causes of current immigration in short/medium term.
We've had plenty of situations in the past where significant migration has occurred, Indians to Britain, Turkish to Germany, Irish/Italians/etc. to America. But they've all managed to eventually integrate well because no-one gave up on them.
The major difference as I see it today is that it's a question of quantity. How do you successfully integrate a million Syrians?
Old fashioned slow integration (watch and wait) worked because people for the large part, genuinely wanted to be in their new country. With the refugees that's not necessarily the case.
Europe is bunch of nation states. Which means that language and race/ethnicity are founding parameters of the most fundamental and powerfull social construct on the continent. If you get 1% of immigrants, they are just guests. But 20% would be very problematic to the national identity, because they don't fit in to the matrix of ethnicity and language. But you can't treat them as non significant "other" anymore because they are everywhere all the time.
So it's also a speed/integration problem. Most Brits don't mind "Normans" anymore. Many Estonians have beef with the very significant Russian minority that migrated after WWII.
Of course current immigration is not anykind of actual problem. It's just that people are afraid of escalation and politicians seem incapable of actually doing anything.
That was probably very rightist of me, but I'm currently very frustrated at the level of the debate here in Europe. Even legitimate concerns (on both sides) are responded to (by both sides) with polarizing s*.
Edit: And the media fuels the fire. For clicks.
The left/right distinction doesn't work very well there. Social democrats are often "big state", while there are several socialist ideologies that want either no state or extremely minimalist states (e.g libertarianism was originally a far left ideology - right wing libertarianism is a recent phenomenon).
My neighbours are a good example. I live in the UK. My ex is black African, and I'm Norwegian. Our neighbours are far right.
Yet they've always been nice to us. If politics ever comes out, one of the first things that gets said is "but not you". They have black and asian friends, despite supporting a party that wants to deport all non-anglo-saxons. It's always about the scary "others" that they worry are stealing their jobs ("but not you") until they get to know they. People who meet them quickly recognise that, hence why they have friends who come to their house who you'd think might have wanted nothing to do with them.
It's not about race, or culture, or religion per se. It's that they're afraid of how change will affect them.
In the UK, we see this clearly reflected in voting patterns too: The racist and/or anti-immigration candidates do best in the areas with the lowest or very highest amount of immigration: The areas where this is an abstract fear and most people have no friends who aren't white-British, and the usually deprived areas where there's a core of poor white people feeling under siege.
The best way to counter these attitudes, it seems, is moderate levels of immigrants spread out more. Of course that would take a lot of investment in redistributing social housing and building more affordable housing in wealthier areas - ultimately this is a socio-economic problem first and foremost.
I'm assuming you and your ex weren't that different and you weren't part of enough difference in the neighborhood for rightists to vote with their feet. But there are thresholds and they have nothing to do with fear.
Cultural factors rarely if ever.
I'm sure there are people for whom cultural factors also play in, but personally I've yet to meet any face to face.
Overlay it with a map of Austria and the rural areas voted very strongly for the right-wing candidate while the larger cities (Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz,...) voted for the green candidate. I'd really like to find the chance to overlay the last elections results for UKIP, Sweden Democrats, Trump, AfD etc. with population density maps.
In the US there has been a flight toward cities, increasing the numbers of people with a cosmopolitan perspective. These demographics are worth watching.
Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of reasons.
These populations aren't what you'd consider traditionally "cosmopolitan" or "sophisticated" by any means. I mean, a voting base of cosmopolitans wouldn't really be enough to win an election anyway.
There's a reason the GOP is trying really, really hard to win over more Hispanic voters lately.
If you're arguing that minority populations are voting for the Left in spite of the Left being aligned with the elite, that's a fairly gross mischaracterization.
There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner. Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.
I'd argue mostly the opposite. There's a shift underway, but I don't think it'll be to the GOP's benefit. Fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are slowly starting to realize they're very different and becoming irreconcilable platforms. You can see the fracturing already this election cycle.
Repositioning, sure. Majority? I think that'll take quite some time while they figure out what they want to be.
> Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.
Err maybe in comparison to Ted Cruz, but it's not really a contest for the general even according to Fox News:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/05/20/latinos...
We'll always have a two party system in the US. What the parties stand for changes drastically over time.
The thing I think most people don't get is that politics is never resolved. There will always be a fight. And in a two party system, no one party will stay in power more than a couple of election cycles. There's a homeostatic mechanism at play.
1. what percentage of the population turns out to vote in Austria?
2. what level of education is most common in Austria?
I have a hard time believing well educated people turn out in droves to vote for the hard right - I mean sure, there is always a percentage and many fiscally conservative people come from money so they tend to be educated, but as I understand it, that's not what they were voting for in Austria, they were basically voting for social conservatism which is anti-immigration, etc.
Then again that percentage is pretty much what the US faces in every Red vs Blue presidential election in the past half-century.
2. The ORF did a survey, where it turned out, that 76% of people who have an education of a-level or higher voted for the left-wing candiate. Only 38% of the people with education less than a-level voted for the left-wing candiate. [2]
[2] https://www.facebook.com/ZeitimBild/photos/a.381568636877.16...
surprisingly almost the same as the last USA presidential election (numbers are far lower for other kinds of votes)
In the US, middle-class and low-income are NOTORIOUS for voting against themselves, election after election after election, putting right-wing policy in place that basically crushes them slowly. Kansas is a textbook study of the final outcome of such behavior.
I call it "f\\k your neighbor voting" because people don't see it as voting against themselves at all but rather they hate their neighbors so much they think these policies will make others suffer and that makes them satisfied.
They do not fare very well though, right? the problem with southern europe countries is corruption i believe. Dictatorships lowered the extent of corruption because they limit it to a very small part of the population. The problem is not democracy, but the lack of other checks and balances that make up a well-functioning state. Also Germany went through economic miracles under democratic governments.
Oddly i am not worried by the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties. They attract the "vote of demonstration", but i don't bevieve the general public really wants to go through the 1930s again.
I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
Yes and no. The median voter theorem suggests that voters' choices were accounted for as parties put their platforms together -- effectively, voters chose, but not when they thought they were choosing.
I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
I think there's a problem caused by voters swinging to margins, no matter which margins they swing to: It increases the gap between the voters and their government (either because extremist voters don't like a moderate government, or because one group of extremists hate a differently-extreme government), which diminishes public confidence in the state. Much like a lack of confidence in the justice system, a lack of confidence in the state tends to have very negative consequences, as people "take matters into their own hands".
Does it help if you have someone who accurately represents you, but she is marginalised within the legislature and has no chance of ever being part of the government? If anything, I'd expect that to make you trust the government even less.
Their standpoints get watered down a lot already after the election when they need to negotiate coalitions, I'd prefer if they were further apart beforehand so it would be easier to make the choice.
Which is that all centrist parties have shifted right in their policy positions and rhetoric.
The charts only show power shifts between parties, but ignore shifts within parties. There's a lot of centrist parties that were rooted in Christian values for example, that were reasonable on e.g. refugee issues in the 20th century (which were much more significant than today, by the way), that now want to amend laws, retract long-standing treaties, create walls and border fences, disallow schooling/work/status for those refugees who do get welcomed so as to send them right back asap in god knows when Syria recovers from being a failed state, paired with hints of xenophobic rhetoric akin to a far right party. Yet they're still deemed centrist parties, and would not show it on the chart.
And that is precisely because the far right is on the rise, and the rest of the political spectrum is adjusting and compromising their stance, so as not to lose votes. That's a very clear shift to the right.
Like take the Netherlands, it shows a drop in the right-wing PVV's size since 2010 (forget for a moment that the party's currently leading in the polls). You'd think, alright no shift to the far right here at all. What it doesn't tell you is that the current biggest party (a non far right wing, right wing party) has shifted much more to the right. Like recently we saw it's 2nd in command claim refugees were visiting the Netherlands to get plastic surgery, breasts corrections, face lifts etc... I mean this guy is just a ridiculous demagogue, instilling fear into the Dutch population that Syrian refugees aren't actually running away from a gruesome war, but are merely looking to exploit our medical system to get plastic surgery, it's insane. If you'd have set this about jews during the holocaust there'd be no discussion, you'd recognised as a clear far-right fascist. And this is the biggest party's 2nd in line, straight out the playbook of a far right-wing demagogue.
Now this party isn't far-right for all intents and purposes, but it has very much shifted towards it on various policy positions and rhetoric, as have many centrist and right wing parties. And none of that shows up in the charts.
This is pretty alarming since I don't really see any counterarguments that ask for less state. We have one party that should nominally do it (FDP) but their agenda is not very liberal if you dig deeper (not very libertarian in the US sense I suppose).
Edit: The other problem is disillusion about the elites not caring about the people which often leads to protest voting for more radical parties. A party that supports some sort of direct democracy and more personal freedom (and also responsibility) is needed and probably has the potential to be somewhat disruptive. I might just be naive but I feel like there's no good non radical offer for people who feel like what they say doesn't matter at all for the established parties.
Exactly. It would make more sense if they used red for the left (due to their Bolshevik legacy).
If you want really weird, consider Denmark where there is a right wing party called "Venstre" (meaning "the left") :)
The name first started looking weird when the Labour Party (then revolutionary socialists, now social democrats) was formed well to their left, followed by further splits up until todays situation where there are - depending on how you place two of the more centrist parties - between four and six parties to the left of Venstre in Norway, counting parties that have or have had a member of parliament at some point. I don't know the history of the Danish party names, but I'm expecting it is a similar history of very literally being the left when formed only to have the balance shift substantially to the left since.
The US colour use is different in that it was simply a matter of not taking historic use of the colours into account and arbitrarily applying it in election broadcasts, only to have it stick.
For Slovakia KDH - Christian Democrats, SMK (later Party of Hungarian Community) and SDKU are all considered right-wing parties.
However, the Hungarian Fidesz is definitely a right-wing party, but not an extreme right.
While in the article's graphs they highlight the far right, in Spain, Portugal and Greece it is the left that has multiplied their support in recent years. In Italy it is M5S, which is hard to locate in a left-right spectrum. And in the US, it is arguably both sides: Trump has surpassed all expectations from the right, but Sanders has also done so from the left (Sanders would probably be considered center or even center-right by European standards, but he's clearly leftist for the US - and were not for the superdelegates of the democratic party apparatus, he would have decent chances of winning too).
The establishment should really exercise self-criticism. I don't know how it feels in the US, but in Europe the system feels really inflexible. The establishment pushes their agenda (e.g. austerity) against the will of a majority of citizens, large demonstrations are totally ignored, referendums are made and the results ignored, mass media are becoming more and more unreliable, etc.
A flexible beam will bend under pressure, an inflexible beam will not bend, but will suddenly break when the pressure is enough. I hope the system exercises some flexibility or we may be in for rough times...
Just as the VVD, a right-wing liberal party is marked as center-left center-right. But if those are marked as center. Same with left wing parties, which show up as 'other'
For instance, spreading lies about immigration is the preferred tool of Tory brexiteers in the UK. The German CSU is not that different from the AfD either.
And in many ways the GOP (even without Trump) is far more right wing than some of the parties considered to be on the extreme right in Europe
In the UK there is a lot of rhetoric that Europe is moving toward the far right rapidly. But if you look at the big players, in Germany, Italy and Spain the far right wing plays almost no role, in France it does but that has not changed appreciably over time.
Meanwhile, in the UK I think story of UKIP is complicated because, while it is clearly appealing to far right themes, essentially it's a single issue party about EU membership.
What UKIP would do if the UK decides to remain (or leave?) the EU is quite hard to foresee.
I'd suggest the picture is messy enough that you can read whatever your pet theory is into it. If there is another deep recession then anything could happen, but you can always say that.
The same is not happening as much in Europe, especially in countries where such fear propaganda didn't set in (like here, in Portugal)
Perhaps someone can allude to me what this article means by right and left (not trying to be snide or anything). Is it compared to US or the more traditional academic version (or maybe I'm mistaken that there is an academic version)?
For the man in the street, far-right fascism and far-left communism equate to to more or less identical levels of coercion and control.
But there are banking bailout and massive cutbacks on social system which has direct effect on the European people. Yet nothing happened. There were some demonstrations and established parties might lost some votes but it's not comparable to the move to right we see right now.
So is the refugee crisis more dangerous to the European people's safety and prosperity? I highly doubt that. Yes, 1.2M is a big number. But that's like 1 refugee per >400 'natives'.
The reason why people are complaining and new right wing parties get established is because they are racist. And there are plenty of explanations for that, yet this is sometime that needs to be taken very seriously. And the worst thing we can do is just blaming politicians and ignoring how much suffering the new right wing causes.
For that, we must import US's talk radio shows and let it brew for years.
Hope no right wing guy is seeing this.
>people's "No" vote is just ignored
>Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU
This points make me really sad. First, because right-wing parties are actively propped up by Russian govt [1]; second, because Russia openly engaged in propaganda and false flags campaign against Ukraine in EU [2]; third, because I'm Russian, an external pressure on the regime is one of the few hopes for a change, and it seems like Russian govt is strong at least in your network, so the pressure will not become stronger. Additionally, quite a few nice people will probably be infected by memes that poisoned Russian society for decades.
It's really sad.
[1]: http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and-the-...
[2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/04/03/azo...
Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine. This makes Russia afraid of the ever growing NATO. Are you part of a liberal minority? I can see you want change as fast as possible but what is as fast as possible?
I apologize if I come across particularly ignorant, it's difficult to find the truth between western news and RT. whenever I read RT I can certainly see and understand the fear of the NATO.
I'm currently reading the new Tsar (about Putin) so far he seems to be loyal to the wrong people sometimes but much less corrupt than he could have been given the people around him (but I'm only half way.) Also he didn't attack Turkey after they took down that fighter, even though Turkey is doing oil business with IS.
I'm not pro-Russia or Pro-Putin, I think we are worse of if we don't try to be friends. (I think the Russians love their children too ;) )
Wait now... You are calling EU war mongering? Remind me again who invaded Ukraine when the Ukrainian people wanted to turn towards the west. In direct violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
Putin is no weakling being manipulated by the oligarchs. He may not show off his wealth but make no mistake, he tightly controls the Russian state and oligarchs - not the other way around.
The Maidan movement may be suspect but pale in the comparison to Russia's actions.
And did they shoot down that jet? There really does not seems to be any motive for them (the Russians) to do that. Maybe they fired on a fighter flying in the radar shadow of the commercial jet? How ethical is that? There is still a lot of vagueness around that incident and it not just from the Russians.
But ok, Putin may not be a nice man, I don't really know, somehow he is never ever in the news here. Whenever I look up stuff on the internet he comes across as quite intelligent, not like a tyrant. My point is, should we make the EU's and Russia's economy suffer? I'm betting you don't know any people in agriculture, the flower or the fruit business that lost their jobs because of this stupid boycott. I'm betting it's much worse in Russia. And who are we punishing? Putin? No, those nice people that live in Russia and work hard to make a living.
How would you feel if you lost your job because suddenly the EU would stop trade with the US because your president build a wall on the Mexican border and kicked out friendly Muslim Families? It's all a game to these people. Let's not humiliate ourselves by screaming in forums what they feed us in the media.
When goods don't cross borders, armies will. Were just getting ready for another senseless war because our leaders are dicks.
I suggest you also read how bad Ukraine was under Yanukovych.
Doesn't excuse anything Russia does though. The sooner it implodes economically the better
You're talking about people you know. People that have already been through a lot of shit over the years. Let's hope for the best, lets hope for stability and prosperity. Both are reached by free trade and free interaction with, and travel to, the rest of the world. Certainly not by boycotts, and not by demonizing an entire nation of people like you and me.
As for me: I am, as you've put it, "a part of a liberal minority". However, I don't think that it should discount my take on the issue: the term "liberal" in Russia is almost nonsensical. Practically anyone who isn't pro-govt is "liberal" here, regardless of their left/right-ism.
I can see how Russia is a curiosity for westerners: it's (physically) big, it was "the second superpower" not long ago, and it "plays with big boys" now. In the same time, the inner workings of Russia are largely unknown, mostly because of lack of interest of Western media and Russian govt making their lives harder (visas, accreditation, etc.) In this situation, the only Russian narrative that is available for westerns is governmental one through RT. The larger context is missing, as evidenced by your comment. However, I honestly recommend staying away from RT. They are completely oblivious for journalistic ethics [1] [9] and don't mind constructing alternative realities, even if they don't do it as shamelessly as their Russian-speaking colleagues.
I will try to provide a bit of that context from several viewpoints.
First, we need to consider everyday lives of common Russians. No doubt they got better in the last years, but a big part of the improvement can be explained by the low base effect. When you see Moscow or Saint-Petersburg on RT or in movies, don't mistake it for the rest of Russia. Most of the Russian cities look more or less like Omsk [2], which is terrible despite having more than a million of residents. I was born in a city called Samara and it is very similar to Omsk. So yeah, when Putin says anything that implies Russia being on par with its western counterparts, remember that it's still a huge problem here to have roads that don't run off with the snow every autumn.
Another part of everyday life is salary. The median net income in Russia is around $300. This is in part because of insane taxes (47% [3]), which are mostly paid by an employer from the salary fund to hide them from the workforce (most Russians never filled their taxes and don't really know how much do they pay). There is also 18% VAT on every good you can buy and additional duties on a lot of goods (e.g. cars). For all this money paid to the government, you can get the average pension of $200 (I wasn't able to find a median pension).
Second, let's move to a bigger picture. You are right that current Russian political situation can be seen as a backlash from "shock democratization" of the 1990s. However, this view is undermined by the fact that the current President holds power for 16 consecutive years now (the thing with Medvedev is that he is a sockpuppet) and isn't going to stand down at all. Moreover, what is apparent in the last five years is that the system isn't going any better; it's going far, far worse, descending right into fascism. I don't use this word lightly and I mean fascism in the classic Mussolinian sense.
I suspect you've heard something about mass protests in Russia in 2012. However, it is less known what triggered them: the amount and straightforwardness of electoral fraud were staggering on parliament elections of 2011 and presidential elections of 2012. I was working on a polling station and ensured correct ballot counting, but then the results were rewritten right under my nose, covered by police. Additionally, all independent watchers and polling board members were forced out of district's polling station by OMON, our local variation of SWAT. Do I need to mention that it's completely illegal, it was done in the whole country, it was widely publicized in the independent press and still no one went to jail and nothing got recounted?
After that, things went south. For the inauguration streets of Moscow were swept clean of anyone who can cause trouble [4] [5]. Elections of governors were called off. People that participated in protests started to get arrested and went to jail for 2-3 years on the base of ridiculous charges. The biggest Russian social network Vkontakte changed its owner to an oligarch associated with Kremlin. Annexation of Crimea happened, followed by the military invasion of Ukraine. MH17 got downed. Laws are in the making to oblige mobile operators to record all phone calls and store them for three years, providing completely unrestricted and unsupervised access to state's special services. Ah yes, operators are already obliged to provide them real-time access to all their customers' calls and internet data, buying surveillance equipment by themselves from state-approved vendors (do I need to mention the word "corruption" here?). It's illegal to sell internet access in Russia without surveillance equipment installed — so much for "evil and unsupervised NSA".
Another issue is total state control of all big media outlets. Russian TV is constructing parallel reality 24/7 (the latest example [6]), preaching hate, spiritual decline of the Western world and the "Russia is surrounded by enemies, so we should consolidate around our leader Vladimir Putin"-meme (which is straight out from Mussolini's book). As an example of how low it gets, a few weeks ago they've aired in prime time home porn shot by a hidden camera (most likely planted by special services) featuring former prime minister (he is now an opposition) and his girlfriend. An attempt to sue the channel got nowhere, courts just refuse to consider the case.
Speaking of which, you've mentioned "fear of the NATO" and I think that it's NATO (and you) who should be afraid — during the last 25 years, Russia supported and ensured secession of 5 territories (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, and Donbass), while no foreign boots were on the Russian ground in the same time period. You can also add Gotland nuclear exercises [7], among other offensive ones, to the mix if you aren't afraid enough. There is no sense in "Russia is afraid of NATO so it annexes territories" meme because the former part can't justify the latter.
Third, we need to consider who really are the rulers of modern Russia. Humanities were neglected, to say the least, during Soviet time, so there is a gap in most older people's education here in Russia. In addition, Putin himself has almost no formal education (he studied law in Soviet university and this can't pass for an education), had some KGB training and plagiarized his thesis [8]. It's no surprise that zero-sum game mentality is prevalent in Russian public discourse, including official statements, and ethics aren't ever considered (not even a lip service). This is a stark contrast with Western politicians, but I doubt that it's noticeable by foreigners.
I'm sorry if the comment is too long or too obscure; I've tried my best to convey some internal context with it. As for me, I strongly believe in positive-sum games, progress and possibility to uphold some ethical standards no matter what (e.g. the importance of human life). From this standpoint, I see current Russian government as a very dangerous setback in Russian's way to a civilized world with all this lying, jailing, killing and hating. I don't know how this dark period will end, but I suspect it may be bloody — social institutions (elections, media, police, ethics) are purposely destroyed and all political alternatives are quenched (sometimes killed, e.g. Boris Nemtsov). The melancholy of powerlessness is now common in people who wanted change in 2012, future seems bleak and the only hope for help is from outside. This is why I reacted to your comment the way I did: I wish that "people of the Western world" cared and understood a bit more about their Eastern neighbor, so seeing that comment stung. I also don't think that you should be friends with Putin's government :)
[1]: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadc... page 5 and onwards
[2]: http://varlamov.ru/1637956.html (in Russian, but pics should speak for themselves)
[3]: http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/tax/paying-taxes-2016/comp...
[4]: https://youtu.be/TNiWnSOsAnE?t=359
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8_0fmen1xk
[6]: http://belsat.eu/en/news/lost-in-translation-russian-tv-dist...
[7]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1213...
[8]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...
[9]: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10207642029506255&se...
You paint a grim and convincing picture.
But what do you think is the best way forward? As it is here people are talking about Russia like the people are Putin, it's unbelievably stupid. The Boycotts punish the people more than the leadership and I feel they only cause an even bigger rift in the Russia/Western relation. That should not be our goal! What, in your opinion, should the west do to prevent war, enable free trade and the exchange of ideas and ideologies?
I have no idea. In the end it will all be fine, of course, but I don't think anyone know how to help countries on their way to democracy. I just find it unlikely that shaking hands with Putin will do much good. However, you are right that hostility to a general population is also bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The current thread is pure politics, of course, but it's also not about the direction you're taking it in here, and internecine politics are worse.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11760362 and marked it off-topic.
>internecine politics
This wasn't my intention at all.
I.e. they are collaborateurs. It seems that Russians use proper name "GAYrope" for part of Europe at least.
Let me remember you that Russia shot civil plane MH17 from Amsterdam to "show that Donbass territory is not controlled by Ukraine anymore".
The far-right in the UK is UKIP and a bunch of Conservatives who are basically UKIP, but don't want to risk losing their seat by jumping ship.
What matters here is where parties and politicians lie compared to the historical norms of their country, and Cameron is far closer to that then, say, Thatcher.