I don't think the far-right is fueled by economic stagnation, but I do think that, were we living in an economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
And those people don't have to be foreign or a different race: just see the anti-tech waves that have rolled through the Bay Area in the past, directed more based on attire and mode of transport than race. And a lot of people here would agree those new workers are to blame for a lot of Bay Area problems, but it's easier to dismiss others as bigoted than wrestle with the reality of winners and losers behind each statistic.
I don't fully know what's going on in Europe, but in the US we have several TV news networks dedicated to making you upset about the increased prevalence of foreigners. And they've been doing it for 30+ years, so it's working, no matter how good the age is or isn't.
I.e. people voting for Farage are not the ones living next door to asylum seekers.
Maybe it's different in the EU and US.
People see problems (mainly caused by the cost of housing) and hear people like Farage blaming it on the "small boats", and people on the other end of the spectrum blaming it on millionaire landlords.
The reality is it's not caused by the 3 asylum seekers per 10,000 people increasing demand, but instead by essential legal immigration (to perform jobs as the native workforce reduces in number) and crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone.
This thus pushes up price thanks to the age old supply/demand curve. How else would we ration housing? Nepotism? Sexual favours? Lottery?
Sure, but if you have an inability to produce more housing, how is importing more foreigners helping with the situation of the locals who are already struggling with the housing market?
I'm not defending Farage or his voters, but don't people have a right to be pissed about this situation?
We're having some similar problems in the US, but not at the same scale. It used to be MS-13 was the big foreign crime boogeyman, now it's the Venezuelan gang "Tren de Aragua": https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/its-spreading-americas...
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/migrant-population-charl...
I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
> I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
Go touch grass ffs! Your reply is infuriating to any victim of terrorism. A single death or wounded from islamic terrorism (the only that really exist) is too much already. If that's not enough for you, please line up with your family and friends and sign to be the next victims and we'll see if "not even 100 deaths" is a good thing or not.
What about pollution? Kills thousands upon thousands of people too! Why are we wasting our time and attention with 24/7 news reports about terrorism every time some nutter stabs someone in the street, when we could be directing our efforts towards eradicating coal, diesel engines, etc?
See where I'm going with this?
Many already are.
I can however name a hundred other things that affect most of their lives daily like inflation, racism, corruption of both the media and political organs by corporate interests, degrading of public infrastructure and institutions that are not aimed at churning out a profit, declining quality of the education system to systemic stress imposed on teachers, etc.
As a society we must focus our attention to those things which really matter. Terrorism is just trying to get our attention.
I also live in a town of 4m which was impacted in the last 10 years by a single terror attack. Should it affect my life? Should I be suspicious of every member of the ethnic group from which the terrorist comes? I couldn't even identify them.
I don't think that the economy in general is key, though high immigration does dampen wages and that is mostly felt at the lower end of incomes. I think what we're seeing are the social and cultural consequences of very high immigration from countries of completely alien cultures and whose people do not assimilate in Europe. This has been going on for decades now but completely ignored by successive governments and that only hardens people's reaction against it. This is compounded by the apparent powerlessness to act "because whatever treaty/law" that we seem to have shackled ourselves with...
However, I often think about that drawing where three people are at a table. A blue-collar worker (mine worker or construction worker), a black sad looking black person (immigrant), and a rich guy in suit.
The blue collar worker has a single cookie on his plate, the immigrant no cookies at all, and the rich guy a plate full of cookies. The rich guy with his plate full of cookies, looking at the worker, points to the immigrant. “He wants your cookie”.
It's a very difficult sociopolitical problem, and it has as much to do with psychology as it does headline statistics. Contemporary media dynamics has much to do with the psychological aspect, but it's also corrupting the way people think about these issues across the ideological spectrum.
Labour's share of wealth produced (vs capital's share) has been declining in the developed world since the 1970s, and is now well past Gilded Age levels and still getting worse.
So yes, it's both about better jobs and about distributing away from the rich and towards the working class: these are the same thing.
1) Income share is complicated: https://equitablegrowth.org/labors-share-lost/ There are structural issues, like automation and immigration, underlying those trends. Immigration isn't, per se, irrelevant, especially when you consider dynamics like volatility and displacement. (But, again, it's complicated.)
2) Throughout history vilifying the rich has not worked out well for the poor and working classes, neither in absolute nor relative terms. Where sustainable improvements have been seen, they're the result of a flattening of the social hierarchy (not necessarily in monetary terms!), but in a way that shifts norms to the type of long-term, group management that you see in the upper middle classes, not the winner-take-all, rat race rules of the poor (at least, that they see as governing inter-class conflict, not necessarily among themselves). The cookie metaphor, both in the model it presents and the devious motivations it insinuates, is rat race rules, and rat race rules favor the rich much more than cooperative, inclusive norms. What you want is for the wealthier to identify with the poorer, but that can only happen (if at all) to the extent the poorer identify with the wealthier. If some wealthy person perceives themselves as having been wholly self-made, despite what's obvious to everybody below him, good! That implies he at least values agency and work ethic, norms that in the United States can be and are shared with people below him on the ladder, and therefore a way to sell political concessions as being in his self-interest (psychologically).
3) Wealth (as opposed to income) doesn't work as implied in the cookie metaphor. Elon Musk is a trillionaire, but there's no bank vault with a trillion in gold bullion that he can go to at will. At any point in time--hour by hour, even--his nominal wealth is primarily a function of the future expectations of others, including expectations of social contentment and economic growth. You can't take half of Musk's cookies and redistribute to everyone; it's entirely non-sensical to think that way. Our intuition breaks down at scale; certainly from a process perspective (as opposed to a static context). Just like running a $30 trillion national economy isn't the same as running a small business (for one thing, nobody runs it), the cookie metaphor leads to horribly misguided ideas about the nature of our problems and the viability of remedies.
Yes, inequality of outcomes matters (at least at the margins), it just doesn't provide much if any insight into causes and solutions. Imbibing in zero sum cookie narratives is counterproductive. Like other forms of social injustice, e.g. racism, it's paradoxical--how can you fix something without identifying the effects with an intention to address them; yet, such a fixation has a tendency to solidify (reify?) the divisions undergirding them. If you look at critical theory, especially critical race theory, you can see an admission of this paradox at the core of the literature. People like Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell came to the conclusion that it's impossible to completely overcome racism--systemic and otherwise. Their perspective is understandable given the seeming intractability of these sorts of problem, I just don't share the fundamental pessimism at the heart of how these issues are framed by contemporary social justice thinking. And it's that framing that I saw in the cookie metaphor. I don't have the right answers, but history has shown us the wrong answers.
The metaphor is not zero sum, and not about handouts.
It's about deliberate diversion of attention, obfuscating the source of inequality to those that experience it. This is something that absolutely happens, both overtly (by endlessly misrepresenting causes of poverty) and covertly (by cultural suppression of socialist ideas).
Kind of like your post.
Money is power. Elon Musk would be a cringe lord if he wasn’t rich. But because he’s rich he gets to play government.
That’s the point of taxation. It’s not to fund anything. The government doesn’t need your money to fund anything.
Or being paid more for the same jobs. Fairer than wealth distribution via taxation but has the same effect.
In this case it seems that the author is pointing out that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or conferred ownership of these public spaces.
I decided to treat it as a minor typo and read it as 'people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased prevalence of "foreigners" on their streets' instead. Ie, the foreigners aren't really foreigners, just citizens of non-aboriginal ethnicity.
By putting the word their in quotes the poster is implying the unstated assumption that states aren't legitimate.