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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

The UK already had a populist takeover - Brexit.

With Brexit and now this I've been thinking that if someone out there is intentionally trying to dismantle the 5 Eyes they're doing a bang up job of it. Step 1 appeal to their nationalistic or even imperial senses to make sure they piss everyone else off, step 2 stoke some internal grievance politics, step 3 get them to unload an entire AR15 magazine into their leg (to paraphrase Dril).

Brexit and Trump are both proxy wars of subversion, with traitorous support from a cadre of extreme reactionaries in both countries spending huge sums on social and trad media to manipulate public opinion in a self-harming direction.

It's very impressive in its way.

Although the winners won't get to enjoy their victory for long, because climate change is going to roll right over everything over the next few decades.

Yes, extreme reactionaries like the United Auto Workers union who showed up in some quantity at the tariff show last night.

The reality is "left wing" parties have completely abandoned their traditional working class demographic - both through encouraging manufacturing to be offshored and allowing in mass unskilled labor to compete with them. During the Bush era I thought working class folks were voting against their self interest when they voted Republican. That's not the case anymore.

It's convenient to try to play this off as some kind of foreign influence thing, but the Democrats did this to themselves.

While there is a lot of good thoughts about what the democrat party did wrong to lose the last election. I feel your comment places all the blame on them. They did not force republicans to go down this road. This is not the inevitable outcome of a broken democrat party. The republicans went down this road, and so did their voters. They chose this, many times. There were many opportunities for the republican party to rid itself of this ideology but they chose power.

So yes, the democrat party has had many failings over the past decade if not more, but that doesn't make this a binary choice between Trumpian policies and democrat failings.

It’s been known since the 2000s that it is in Russia’s best interests to weaken the UK-EU link. Russia was a major contributor to the Brexit cause, but it seems this topic quickly gets swept under the rug by British parties, red or blue.

That is because both were manipulated and ashamed of it. Russia is too sophisticated to play just one side. They have centuries of experience playing various ethnicities within russia against each other to maintain control. In the 2016 US election, Russia would have had a strong plan either way, what the alternative would have been and if would have succeeded, who knows, but it is note worthy how many members of the US administration, including its head, were formerly democrats.

I guess. I was thinking more of dictatorship rather than populists getting voted in. We may well get Farage voted in some time.

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