Austerity Creates Fascism | Hacker News Reader

Austerity Creates Fascism

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See perhaps Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Blyth

That is quite a sentence "...if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery"

Dcotorow snark is next-level snark.

Canada has a rapidly dropping balance of trade.

Huge deficit, shocking how quick it has increased in a year while also cutting government jobs.

Meanwhile they have fired/(attrition with new rules they will violate) nearly 100,000. About 25% of the government.

I dont blame the people doing the austerity, I blame those who forced the austerity.

Money should not be in the control of the government. It should be in control of the people of the world. Money should be free from and independent of government. Consider tokenized gold and other decentralized cryptocurrencies -- the more we use them, the less governments have to do evil with.

Oh boy, we'll step on this rake again and again. It will get much much worse before we could make it better.

The US does not respond with austerity during a crisis, it responds with ever larger economic stimulus by printing money at the central bank. The next crisis will be no different. There is zero political appetite for austerity so it will not happen in the US.

That is only mostly true. In practical terms the opposite of austerity is inflation, and consumers really don't like paying more for things knowing they are becoming dramatically poorer. Austerity is challenging to measure, but debt and inflation are not.

At some point the music stops and a lot of people will be left without a chair. That's when austerity becomes a rally cry.

> That is only mostly true. In practical terms the opposite of austerity is inflation

Weimar says inflation creates fascism too. Not surprising because scientifically speaking, any sufficiently developed inflation is austerity by another name.

The NHS study cited in the post is pretty strong evidence that precarity can increase support for proto-fascist politics.

But that rationale falls flat in the US context, as many analyses show that the median income of MAGA supporters is quite high. Right-wing extremism in the US isn't really about revolting peasants, it's about an alliance among multiple groups up and down the security-precarity spectrum, with very strong support from the top 5% and even more support from the top 0.1%.

Just because precarity can be a causal factor doesn't mean it's the only factor or even the dominant factor in the US.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see the US regime move into full money-printer stimulus mode to finance its wars of choice and give its base a little financially security before this year's midterm elections.

And it's coming from a starting point in which MAGA already distrusts government, so there's no need to have an external factor involved. It's quite odd looking in from another country where the government may not necessarily be too competent but generally tries to do the right thing and most people are looked after even if they grumble a bit, to the US where the government could cure cancer and half the population would say its a conspiracy by George Soros or Bill Gates or Big Pharma or the lizard people and would want nothing to do with it.

Yes but economic stimulus where? Wealth inequality has risen so much because of huge government spending in the wrong areas that transfers wealth to the wealthy, it happened in 2008 and in COVID.

I'm confused, is Cory under the impression that the fascism isn't already here? America is well underway on the that project. Frankly the fascism was plenty apparent after 9/11, when the Bush years entrenched a permanent security state through endless-war powers (AUMF), mass surveillance (Patriot Act/NSA spying), expansive detention and torture regimes (CIA black sites like Guantanamo), a huge domestic enforcement bureaucracy (DHS/ICE), and tax cuts that concentrated wealth upward, cuts to education and healthcare. These are the exact things the current-day fascists are using to choke us now.

People are only upset today because it's affecting white folk more directly, when back then it was aimed at Muslims. We warned you all back then about this, we warned again in 2016, we warned again in 2024, and yet here we are, knee deep in fascism. Maybe we'll be neck deep soon but let's not pretend this is just starting or about to start because of AI.

Words have meaning, I don't think any serious scholar would agree with you that the US in the early 2000s was a fascist state. It lacked the societal regimentation, the autocracy, the personality worship, the aesthetics of order, the totalitarianism of the state, the subservience of religion and the individual to the state. It's an absurd proposition.

Fascism is absolutely here today, there's no question about that.

There's also a direct line to the fascism we see today emanating from proto-fascist project the GOP was engaged in standing up during the early 2000s.

That GW was not the fascist leader everyone wanted him to be doesn't really push back against the idea that this group of people has largely fascist leanings. Trump gave them the final missing ingredient which was the cult leader. But every other feature you listed as missing I find were actually present, and we can debate that if you want.

But we can see how the Bush admin and voters are reacting to abject fascism. They applaud it, support it, amplify it, excuse it, or they stay silent and never push back (like Bush himself). A lot of them are the same people from back then. So really, to me the absurd proposition here is that the people who stood up the CIA torture black sites, warrantless wiretaps, homeland security, ICE, etc. who are now turning these things against all Americans, weren't at least latent fascists or fascist-leaning in their ideology.

Marcuse wrote in the 1960s that the only way to prevent another Hitler from rising is to give the left free rein and cage and muzzle the right. So by extension, anyone who supports rightists being able to spread their ideas freely, let alone implement them with real political power, is a fascist in effect even if they disclaim identification with Hitler's or Mussolini's political philosophy.

I think the other way to say this is every time the right is given free reign to implement their ideas with real political power, they end up implementing fascism. Therefore, we might prefer to temper that by not allowing them to have free reign. This does not imply giving the left free reign (as you could say the same about them), as there's ample room for consensus under this model.

We weren't a fascist state at that point, but we sure have been laying the groundwork since then.

Oh really? Just ask any Black person.

Did we have the segregation well into the 50's? Did we bomb entire city blocks? Do we regularly have police swarm, main, and kill protesters?

*maim

Fascism's causes are many and situational; economic depression is one risk among many. "X causes Y" is too often an oversimplification most times, especially when lacking overwhelming quantitative supporting evidence.

That's weird Canada had austerity in the 90s and we didn't get fascism.

I think the article confuses "austerity" with lack of social programs. Canada has a huge safety net compared to the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_Canada

Essentially all the "warning conditions" that come out of austerity are also require a serious lack of safety net. Lack of savings, difficulty of childcare and healthcare, etc.

Usually austerity means cuts to social programs and the consequences depend on the country's starting position.

Fascism rise is also associated with perceived inequality rising. So if Canada didn't have a class of folks profiting immensely while others were hit, less fascism.

I think ya'll should count yourselves very very lucky America became such a prolific visible rake stepper.

There were scary scary things abrew, a rapid falling sentiment, festering under the all-too-common Fear Uncertainty and Doubt antagonist politics that is the hallmark of the the conservatism to fascism pipeline.

I'm definitely applying some recency bias here, am not super atuned to the historical zeitgeist of the Canadian people. But there has been, over the years, a lot of strongmen esque not good things. And it seems like last year's election really avoided a very perilous further drop to madness by seeing what all a couple months of madness across the border looked like. Page with some polling numbers, brief in rundown, thar is at least directionally correct: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/34363/polling-average-can...

But it would be nice to have some retellings of Canada's austerity & how that affected the people over the past two three decades! For sure!

Austerity does not create fascism. The examples in the article are just all wrong. Even if you call Trump and Orban fascists, they did not follow austerity. The reaction to the financial crisis was the largest fiscal and monetary interventions in history. Orban consolidated power by spending and state expansion, not austerity. True austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal of recent times led to new parties, but those countries are politically doing surprisingly well.

Inflation is arguably a causal driver of fascism, like in the Weimar Republic, which is made worse by loose fiscal policy. Biden's ARP added significantly to inflation according to a central bank analysis and inflation was one of the main reasons he lost the election to a populist.

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