Jacobin has a lot of coverage; no endorsement implied (I still have to go through it):
I could not get to this paywalled article, but maybe one of you can?
https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no2/brazils-never-ending-crisis
Is this one an ignorant buffoon too? Fascists seem to like their ignorant buffoons.
Does anyone have a good explanation for the global resurgence of fascism? Because I'm starting to think that every few generations right wingers just get bored.
I'm afraid that it's a global reversion to the mean of fascism because everybody who remembers World War II is dead or too old.
I'm very reluctant to call any of this actually fascism.
To the extent their is actually a common pattern I think it's the slow-burning aftermath of 2008, and each country throws up its own response. Basically I just don't know enough about any of these countries.
3: maintaining the liberal global order is a fairly thankless job even when times are good, and "every few generations" all the maintenance personnel burn out on it, with gruesome results. The flippancy of this comment hides how incandescently angry I am about it, in part because a lot of that rage is self-directed, and I suspect a lot of it is futile. Of course people get complacent; of course they sink energy into insignificant power struggles; of course collectives tend toward disorder.
Every once in a while I stop and think about the lurkers reading my comments.
-their +there
7: True, but I think the post-1945 period is so unusual any cyclical narrative is bound basically to be wrong.
Is this gonna be one of those things where we're not allowed to say the word fascist because someone somewhere has misused the term? Should I have said demagogic, anti-rational oligarchy fueled by racism and misogyny?
7: Also, that's a really Americo-centric reading of events*. The people maintaining the liberal world order were/are essentially the political parties of the United States, and those of core US allies a quite distant second. The political classes of Brazil**, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, were always very peripheral.
*Please don't take this as an attack. I have basically the same view, hence the ignorance in 6.
**The BRIC construct was never anything more than a headline.
don't take this as an attack -- you can feel 100% free to attack my lazy one-sentence reply to a vague question on a blog late at night in California, believe me, although if you work too hard at it I'll start to feel guilty about setting some kind of trap for you. Of course you're fundamentally right, but a fuller answer would, I think, go right into the weeds talking about complex interactions between economic and political actors.
TBH I'm not onto the next outrage yet. The shooting yesterday shook me the fuck up and it's going to take a while to get over. I am truly sorry about Bolsonaro, but I have to throttle transmissions pretty heavily this week.
13: kakistocracy. You can add a fake version number if you want.
In the US, the roots of what's going on now can be seen pre-2008, but maybe without the 2008 crash it would have stayed in the fringes. Even specifically anti-Soros propaganda goes back a ways; you can find conservatives calling some of his wealth "drug money" in 2004 or so. A whole infrastructure has been built to isolate conservatives in a world where claims like that are taken to be true, or unchallenged enough to seem plausible if unverified.
I keep thinking I'll pull together my thoughts on this but then I remember that I'm not sure even I care what I think. Also I don't really have insights into other countries. In the US, there's definitely a lot to say about institutional build-up and the media environment. Other places I don't know.
*Obviously there's a long nativist history in the US. But I'm thinking of the period following the lifting of a lot of immigration restriction in 1968.
The start of this article about online platforms and far right politics is like the inverse of the Timothy Garton Ash book where he travels to a few of the democratic revolutions of 1989.
16 raises the question of the importance of epistemic closure. Are there parallel media bubbles?
17 is interesting. You should pull your thoughts together, fa.
Is it better or worse that he was elected? Because I remember Latin America when it was basically juntas all the way down, except for plucky Costa Rica, which didn't even have an army.
@3 because the current economic order has severe cracks in it, and faced with the choice the rich will prefer fascism over social democracy.
https://twitter.com/CBCNews/status/1056712250113867776
Also, and relevant I think to Brazil, is that the middle classes will prefer fascism to Venezuelan-style socialism.
No, but to judge from the comments of Brazilians I have spoken to, that was what Bolsonaro ran against (amongst other things).
24: Also see US Republican party's current campaign.
5/10/12: what does Fascism actually mean then?
On May 10, 2012, Heebie asked a question about fascism.
On October 29, 2018, Doug asked Heebie to provide a link to her question about fascism.
Heebie, would you please provide a link to your question about fascism?
I was about to type up this comment and then thought, wait, isn't this a conspiracy theory?
Maybe it is!
Anyway, I don't know what's going on, but I think about the possibility that a group of bad actors has found a way to use misinformation to take advantage of existing divisions in any given country in order to bring down the liberal order.
Fuck the rich, but at this point "the rich" are a bogeyman designed to make everyone else unaccountable. Brazilians literally voted for Bolsonaro. They heard the arguments that Bolsonaro was a fascist who was going to murder gays and immigrants, and they voted for him. Some (many? most?) hate immigrants more than they hate the rich, or at the very least they are easily led to hate them.
29: There is a set of common techniques, but they aren't exactly arcane knowledge at this point.
6. is right in that 2008 was probably the trigger, but the cause goes back to about 1980 when essentially the first generation with no memory of the Great depression took over and reverted to free market ideology and unwinding the welfare state/New Deal and then the centre left climbed on board with them.
Heebie, would you please provide a link to your question about fascism?
re: 32
I think that's right, but also, somewhere or other, the breakdown of whatever systems* were in place to prevent total sociopaths and self-deluding incompetents taking over everywhere. Somewhere, you'd have hoped for a correction, but it hasn't happened and seemingly can't happen.
* formal/informal/whatever. Trade unions, media organisations, the church, civil service, "the Establishment", etc.
Is it better or worse that he was elected? Because I remember Latin America when it was basically juntas all the way down, except for plucky Costa Rica, which didn't even have an army.
In a way, but the election was a referendum on whether they should abolish democracy and have a military dictatorship, which won.
Bolsonaro looks pretty fashy to me.
34: it was also a generation of *voters* growing up who had not known the war, etc. In that sense, yes, the boomers fucked everything.
They thought they could live an entirely weightless life. I was born in 1955, and I remember just how incredibly optimistic I was as a matter of course, although my parents did their best to infuse me with stoic gloom about human nature.
@30 No problem with people being accountable, but the press played a role, and something shifted in a country that swung from a centre-Left to a 'kill all the gays' majority. It wasn't just 'people decided to be more evil'.
I wonder if it's as simple as governing is hard, promising is easy.
Maybe the endless project to make us hate our representatives, to assume that they're all corrupt unless proven otherwise, has devalued electing people who can actually get things done. (After all, a lot of getting things done involves log rolling and pork, which voters focus on and read as corruption.)
Once you break the link between electing people and actually doing things, bold solutions win out because you've given up on anyone delivering what they promise, so the election defaults to "looks energetic" versus "trapped by their own smarts" or "too meek to have a plan dramatic enough for our situation". Fascists might just be the first movers, since they're long on promises and haven't been held to accomplishing anything due to [many things: the deep state, their limited political power, the media...].
The start of this article about online platforms and far right politics is like the inverse of the Timothy Garton Ash book where he travels to a few of the democratic revolutions of 1989.
That's a good article.
I don't feel like I'm good at recognizing the impulses that fuel right-wing politics. But I am convinced that one important element is a tension over how to understand masculinity (in the 21st Century) and this paragraph seems like an example of that.
Chances are, by now, your country has some, if not all, of the following. First off, you probably have some kind of local internet troll problem, like the MAGAsphere in the US, the Netto-uyoku in Japan, Fujitrolls in Peru, or AK-trolls in Turkey. Your trolls will probably have been radicalized online via some kind of community for young men like Gamergate, Jeuxvideo.com ("videogames.com") in France, ForoCoches ("Cars Forum") in Spain, Ilbe Storehouse in South Korea, 2chan in Japan, or banter Facebook pages in the UK.
One of my usual theories about Trump and modern politics is that the skills needed to become elected have always been a bit different from those needed to govern effectively and/or morally. This is not a new problem, people have been complaining about politicians forever, but our culture, politics, and media have degenerated to the point where we a party with a whole lot of the former and absolutely none of the latter came to power.
Not sure how well that explains the frightening right-wingers all over the world, though. Also, I first formulated that over a year ago. At the time, mocking Republicans seemed more appropriate. Between then and now things have become a bit scarier. It's harder to laugh at that.
Perón and other strongmen won electorally, no?
Fascists sensu lato have been elected many times, all over the world. arguably, Mussolini and Hitler were elected, once. Salazar certainly.
I do think that in the UK the media really share a massive part of the blame.
The BBC in particular have really been terrible for a decade or more. Post-David-Kelly, for sure, but it's not just the fall out from that and an unwillingness to criticise the government in power. They've been actively embracing and promoting rightwing shitbags like Farage, Johnson, and the big influential debate and current affairs programs have been deeply slanted towards the dunning-kruger-tory-brexiteer-fuckwit wing for a long time.
Somewhat pwned on preview.
27: I'm sure I'm not the best person here to answer that. Fascism of course was never a coherent ideology, so much so that I doubt the term has any actual meaning at all (in which case, all the more reason to stop using it). That said, I think the historical fascists (Nazis, Fascists) had substantial party organizations and took over through a mix of electoral success and paramilitary violence. AFAIK* none of the current fascists (Turkey, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Brazil, US) have any paramilitary elements, and all won free elections outright at least once, in the first three countries multiple times. Also in those three countries I think there's been a gradual consolidation of one-party rule by constitutional means, reminiscent of the Nazi gleichschaltung, and ideologically they look the most fascist (in some ways - nationalism, racial purity, historical romanticism). In the latter three countries AFAIK governance has been basically chaotic and aimless (in Brazil too soon to say). Also in those three the leaders aren't on top of functioning party structures, they're fringe actors who rode popular support in the face of a collapsing right-wing establishment**.
Ideologically though I think fascism also essentially included a social Darwinism and outright imperialism which AFAIK none of the current crop do. And the historical romanticism admits of degrees of variation. Mussolini's golden age was Rome. Bolsonaro's is what, the 1960s? Trump's the 1950s? Clearly they're related, but there's also a lot of difference.
My reflex is just that calling "fascism" is a lazy response. Actually dealing with shit even at a minimal engaged-citizen level involves as lk says, going "right into the weeds talking about complex interactions between economic and political actors".
*I repeat 6. I'm working with almost no knowledge of any of these countries.
**Maybe less true in the Philippines?
22 et seq: In fairness, Brazil had hyperinflation less than 30 years ago, they've been watching Argentina's neverending crisis ever since, and they have actual Venezuelan refugees crossing their border.
Broadly, fear is definitely crucial for authoritarian thinking in general. Economic instability will do that; for Brazil and the Philippines I'd speculate that violence adds a lot of fear. Where in the Murdochsphere that fear has been consistently manufactured without basis over decades, culminating in Trump and Brexit, in those countries there is actual violence, and maybe spikes in it contributed to results (randomly, without causal relations to events elsewhere). For instance in Brazil the army was given control of policing in Rio de Janeiro state in February (at civil request), after years of escalating involvementin policing (interestingly ominous article, in hindsight).
I think it says a lot that this is happening worldwide not during the Great Recession, but distinctly after.
Sarah Taber (Idk if she has a point on Weimar but Jim Crow is a good example): "When people are economically anxious for real, they're busy surviving. Ain't got time for genocide. "Economic anxiety" is an excuse that comfortable people need to believe, in order to do uncomfortable things."
Similarly, Brazil isn't in the throes of a recession, it just recovered and is on the upswing, although certainly not out of the woods.
46 A large number of these contemporary movements seem to hit most if not all of Eco's 14 points.. I don't think it's lazy at all to call it what it looks like.
50: Ok! Which movements do and don't?
re: 51
Trumpism hits most of them, no? All of them, really.
So does the thicker wing of UKIP and the pro-Brexit campaign. There's another wing, of course, that's not really ur-Fascist, but views those people are useful idiots.
Bolsonaro really seems to fit the bill most of all. But also Hungary, Poland, Philippines, and increasingly the US of A.
I suppose you could say Duterte fits the authoritarian strongman mold more than straight up fascism. But there's a pattern here and it's global and accelerating at an alarming pace.
Also, regardless of the causes and paths, the whole planet/geopolitical system is on track for large-scale genocide in many different places. It has been bugging me increasingly that people are still "demanding action on climate change" -- boy, is there ever fucking going to be "action on climate change," some of which you see before you here. The question is how much anyone on the anti-genocide side of things will be able to control the narrative.
(Among other things, I'm sure the Republicans here will go all in on anthropogenic climate change once there's any attempt, by the UN or otherwise, to assert a climate refugee status. "They did it to themselves! Science is unanimous! They should pay us reparations!" This may have happened already.)
I'm not convinced Eco's lived experience necessarily makes him the best diagnostician of true fascism, but at the same time I'm not sure how much it matters whether what we're seeing is true fascism. It's about as horrible / conducive to genocide, and possibly has more staying power in that keeping around more of the forms and structures of legality, as opposed to shouting "democracy was a mistake we are ending," appears to diffuse outrage.
55.1 And Bolsonaro's going to privatize the Amazon!
This argument is so much rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Especially after the events of the past week.
I'm sure one can point to some significant differences between fascism now and then, I'm just not at all convinced they're important, nor the thing we should be focusing on now.
||
Also, hey lawyers! A sibling friend would like to know what her options are if she strongly suspects a new male hire, still in college, is about to get offered a 20% higher salary than hers when she has considerably more experience and education. Roles are not identical but seem pretty close in seniority. (She is in a position to overhear the negotiations in the next office and is struck by how different the response to this young man is from the one they gave her, when she was negotiating...)
|>
57-8: Comity. Reflexive pedantry. I still think getting deep in the weeds matters though.
60 Comity. I've had a bit too much whiskey to continue this but it seems like your sine qua non is imperialism. I see current movements as heavily revanchist in spirit but without much of the imperialism (actual Russian actions and wishful Brexit expressions excepted).
I know very little about Brazil, but Iberian Fury lived there, and has a lot of Brazilian friends and FB-friends. From what I gather, the violence MC mentions in 48 is a crucial factor. The homicide rate is about 30/100k population, which is 6x that of the USA (and about 30x that of Austria). And while that 5/100k rate in the USA is down by half since its peaks (in '74, '80, '91 I think), Brazil's is more than twice what it was in 1980 and appears to be increasing again (or stabilizing at a higher level) after decreasing in the early 2000s: compare this and this.
So: a truly horrific level of violent crime, combined with deep poverty, inequality, recession (which may be technically over but perceptions and employment are always lagging indicators) and corruption are extremely good conditions for a putative outsider promising to clean up the system and the streets (I recall seeing somewhere that some crazy-high percentage of *even those Brazilians who'd been abused by police* were in favor of extrajudicial executions of some subset of criminals!). The Workers' Party was originally able to channel the discontent with the system, and accomplished a lot. But the combination of corruption (yes, less corrupt than the rest, but that's not enough) and having been in power until 2 years ago makes it harder to reclaim that populist, us-against-the-system mantle. Lula could have done it. But, unjustly or not, he's in prison, and the PT bench was apparently very shallow.
I also increasingly find myself in a rage about the massacre at the synagogue earlier this week. We're going to see more and more of the same and I want to do more than just punch Nazis.
Also Proud Boys are a lot like Brownshirts, as ludicrous as that might seem.
Also, re: paramilitary elements -- Duterte has explicitly encouraged extrajudicial killings by police, and Bolsonaro also endorsed them. At least for the former, that wasn't just cheap talk:
'Almost six months into the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, police records and data gathered by Al Jazeera show the death toll in his anti-drug war has almost reached 6,000.Despite the mounting toll, Duterte was quoted as saying on Monday that fewer people were being killed, adding "most of them have been finished off anyway, I am not kidding".'
65: I meant paramilitaries directly controlled by the ruling party/dictator. Per 60, I'm not going to pursue any further though.
59:
Step 1: Send out resume. When the current salary question comes up, say something like, "For my position, the company pays X," where X is what the new guy gets.
Step 2: Accept a new offer, on condition that she does't have to start right away.
Step 3: Go to the old boss to discuss the situation and request a match. This is likely to go poorly. Divulging that she obtained information about the guy's salary through eavesdropping, that could go either way. It's grounds for firing without cause, so they may cut or deny a severance package, and even dispute an unemployment insurance claim. On the other hand, if boss is concerned about unrelated things she may or may not have heard through the wall, he may be willing to throw lots of money at her, either as salary or as severance.
Step 3: She should not reign, Don't resign, and should not immediately accept what severance package is offered. . Negotiating a severance package is actually easier than negotiating a raise. Point out that in that discussion that the Company is probably violating various laws. Make sure that the final severance agreement requires confidentiality by themand well as by her, and forbids any public disclosure of reasons she was fired (e.g. when someone calls for a reference).
Step 4: Buy a new car, or more likely a new bicycle, with the severance package, and start work at the new place.
I can't stress how important it is to follow the order of the steps. Confronting the boss without a new job is unlikely to work. Quitting when you get yourself fired is leaving money on the table.
NOT legal advice blah blah blah. Probably illegal advice.
It seems appropriate to post some machine-generated reply like "Haha thanks!" or "Love it!", but I'll go with: thanks, point taken, I think.
Am I right in thinking the Nazis came to power well after the worst of their economic crisis had passed?
Now that they've unleashed this murderous rage, how long before the Trumpsters figure out an angle that puts the blame squarely on liberals (including, e.g., "the late night comedians")?
69. Yes. But it was still pretty shit.
69: Yes.
The hyperinflation was a full decade before the Nazi seizure of power. But, as chris y pungently noted, early 1933 was still depths of the Depression.
Infographic: Bolsonaro vote share positively correlated with Human Development Index.
Web-translated headline: "Bolsonaro wins in 97% of the richest cities and Haddad in 98% of the poor".
67 step 3: "It's grounds for firing without cause" is unclear. If it's valid grounds for firing, that would not be without cause, right? I suspect what is meant is that "It may piss the boss off enough to have him/her look for an excuse to fire you, even if it is not seen as a valid reason for termination by itself." If she was taking active measures to bug the conference room, that would be grounds for firing, but just sitting in your office doing your work while the boss has a loud discussion in the next office doesn't strike me as valid cause for objection. Of course, with employment at will, just pissing the boss off is often enough to result in termination, but I wouldn't expect that to stand up as a "for cause" if they try to fight unemployment.
Yes I meant to say it's grounds for firing with cause. The employer would argue that if you are hearing the boss's conversations you should tell the boss, so the company can fix the acoustics or whatever. Usually employers win that kind of argument.
What does 'grounds for firing with cause' mean for an at will employee? That is, it means nothing legally that I know about, and if we're talking about morals or ethics, I can't see how it could possibly be an argument that the boss is morally justified in firing her. It might piss the boss off, and he might fire her, but it's not a matter of justification as far as I can see.
Oh, wait, you mean 'for cause' in the sense that unemployment could be denied? I don't think that's likely in the slightest.
Directly to 59: This is the sort of thing that depends sensitively on the particular job. If it's the kind of employer that is big enough to have an HR department and an understanding of how employment law works, she should know that it's illegal to retaliate against someone for complaining of discrimination, regardless of whether the complaint is ultimately determined to be well-founded.
That won't necessarily keep them from firing her for complaining, but if she does complain, she should do it in some written form that she has a record of.
Wet clay is an option, but not very portable and you have to watch things don't get erased before it dries.
Don't printer companies make most of their money from Incan cartridges these days?
But there's a pattern here and it's global and accelerating at an alarming pace.
I think it's important to get into the weeds to figure out just how much is a real secular trend and how much is actually noise.
Take the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka, who on the face of it I'm ok calling fascist. They ruled for 10 years, crushed the LTTE, built a massive security state, a personality cult, an alliance with China. I thought it would be presidency-for-life, no question. Then they lost an election three years ago, and they were out*. If they were getting elected today they would be called part of the wave, handwringing, thinkpieces, whatever. But Sri Lanka's shit has been going on for decades, their Buddhist/Sinhalese fundamentalist thing started more than a century ago. The fascism was/is local, and it was reversible. I expect at least some of what we're seeing now will be the same.
*Though they may have made a comeback by the time I finish writing. Weird backstabbing shitshow there atm.
On top if everything else, the orange shit is apparently going to drop into Pittsburgh right during my commute without even saying where he's going to park his boily asshole. If he stays out at the airport, that would be just great.
Ok, that's it, I'm gonna start buying firearms. I am very dubious about the possibility of successful resistance, but when they kick in your front door...
You aren't even in Pittsburgh.
As you all know, I've been predicting that they'll try to get Wong Kim Ark overturned. And what do you know: Trump says he can do it by executive order. Why not -- he's the Leader and the Source of all Authority now, right?
The only way that Trump is an improvement over Obama is that he doesn't come to Philadelphia. Due to proximity to DC and the prevalence of rich Democrats, Obama or Biden screwed up traffic here 3-4 times a year. They even stop subway service for an hour or two. Once Obama decided to walk a block from one fundraiser to another, and my office was literally locked down from 5 to 7 pm. I was so tempted to hit him with a spitball from my fifth floor window, but the Secret Service sniper on the roof across the street would have shot me.
The night before the 2016 election, a get out the vote rally involving both Clintons, both Obamas, and both Bidens, fucked up evening rush hour even is more than usual. Query whether pissing off so many locals explains why Hillary lost Pennsylvania.
Toomey declined to visit with Trump. I wonder if Toomey even comes into the city since he moved his office to avoid protesters?
89: The wording of the 14th amendment seems pretty fucking clear to me. It's not even like the 2nd, with an introductory clause.
92: Wong Kim Ark was not unanimous. There are wording parlor tricks they could go back to.
Anyway, whatever precise senile concept Trump throws out there (possibly reacting to irresponsible media prodding) isn't as important as the intention, to persecute immigrants and people of color. That intent will filter down through law, bureaucracy, and courts just fine.
I've never read the decision, but "All persons born or naturalized in the United States" is really clearly written.
It's followed by "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". It originally meant children born to diplomatic staff, but the federal government tried to drive a truck through it before the Court and they could try again.
Does that mean that if you come into the U.S. illegally, you can do any crime and can't be punished?
93: (possibly reacting to irresponsible media prodding)
Yeah, fucking Axios. Jonathan Swan now says he was working with a WH source on the story and decided to "prompt" the president.
I'm guessing the source may well have been Stephen Miller.
85 Things have moved on but I'd say there's getting into the weeds and there's cherry picking.
69: What? No. The German economy was horrible in the aftermath of WW1, then was good after 1923, and then collapsed right after the stock market crash. The entire German banking system failed. Unemployment was like 30% when Hitler came to power.
Overall, unemployment was very high. But it was 0% among millennials.
