Watching the insane dissembling of democracy, the rule of law, rationality, compassion and civility into a mass madness of racism, intolerance, hatred, genocide, the abandonment of even the pretence of truth, and a frighteningly unconscious embrace of emergent tyranny is truly crazy-making in itself, which is part of the problem. No-one feels like they have a handle on the world around them anymore.
As I have observed before, the onset of fascism is a mass mental disorder, but what is astounding is just how viral and massive it has become. Obviously, the rise of social media and its algorithmic tendencies to amplify outrage and assign users to echo chambers has a huge amount to answer for in this regard, but it cannot be the whole story.
While right wing ‘populism’ should be an oxymoron, (like why would pro-billionaire authoritarianism ever be popular) sadly it has ways of harvesting grievance that defies rational analysis. We should understand that proto-fascists (right wing populists) have an advantage that no democratic political movement has ever had; it doesn’t need to build enduring support, from election to election, from generation to generation.
Precisely because it is anti-democratic, it only needs to ever win one election then its intention is always to abuse every lever of power to cement itself in place. For this reason, it can indeed be ‘populist’ because it can offer everybody and every grievance the relief it seeks without ever having to come up with the goods.
Right wing populism is a grift from beginning to end. Take the money and influence that comes with doing the bidding of billionaires, but wrap yourself in a flag and pretend to be a champion of the common people.
Promise to liberate the common folks from the grip of the terrible ‘elites’ who can be blamed for every grievance from the cost of living to personal sexual frustration and everything else in between.
Let’s be clear, democracy has had its flaws, the rule of law has had its flaws, the way our economy is managed has more than flaws. But if we drill down we find that the main problem with democracy is not having enough of it; the main problem with the rule of law is the way that the super-privileged can often avoid its reach; and the real problem with our economy is that it has for too long been managed to suit the investor class while taxing the exertion of workers.
Neo-liberalism, the Reagan/Thatcher grift that lied to us about trickle-down economics, pretending that ordinary people would somehow benefit from the wealthy paying less tax and accumulating a greater share of global wealth was always a grift. John Howard was its salesman in Australia.
Yes, elites may be responsible for the terrible housing crisis, the flattening of wage growth, the perverse inversion of the tax system, but which elites? The actual economic elites, not university professors, scientists, feminists, intellectuals and latte-sipping lefties, not green-haired social movement activists.
As annoying as you may have found any of these people at times, the real elites that have ripped us all off are obvious by the obscene wealth they have accumulated and the cynical ways in which they manipulate media, information and technology to get us to blame the wrong people. The Ginas, the Elons, the Murdochs, these are the real elites and the John Howards and the Pauline Hansons are merely their puppets.
The past golden era of life in the USA or Australia where a single-income family could buy a home and raise a family were the result of post-war socialist policies, and trade union activism that involved the taxing of wealth and its redistribution into government services to produce a fairer society. The golden era was a capitalist economy very strongly modified by democratic socialism.
And ironically it is that very era of democractic socialism that our right wingers cynically remind you of while encouraging you to blame migrants, unionists, feminists, academics, greenies, indigenous people, LGBTIQ people or anyone other than the real architects of poverty, the billionaires and their puppets.
Pauline Hanson is a great example, wrapped in the Australian flag as a cover for grift, she winges and whines in an affected strine, while being feted and funded by Gina, and if you look at her parliamentary voting record, she has opposed every wage increase, Centrelink adjustments, HECS relief, cost of living support, and attempt to tax the investor class that has come across her table. A handmaiden of wealth pretending to be a champion of the Aussie battler. That’s populism, tell whatever lie will get you votes.
Trump used the same formula, the former ‘great’ America was the one that was the outcome of Roosevelt’s post war ‘new deal’, a largely democratic socialist program to redistribute wealth and use tax to create a fairer society. The very thing the right-wing populist is committed to destroying is exactly what they pretend they will resurrect.
We don’t need any more tax cuts in this country, we need more taxation of the investor class (less taxation of exertion income: labour) and renewed spending on health education, community facilities, welfare and wealth redistribution. In short, we need more Whitlam and less Howard and definitely no Pauline.
It’s sad to see how social media and populist grifters can turn genuine social problems into potent hate bombs deliberately targeting people who are also suffering and who are in no way responsible for the decline of equality.
Migrants are more likely to be taking care of your aging parents in low-paid aged care roles, or nursing you in what’s left of our fantastic taxpayer-funded public health system, than showing up to deprive you of a home at an auction; that’s the investor class that does that to you.
Economic inequality is one of the grievances that is cynically exploited by the right, but more viscerally they also exploit two other grievances, one is lost privilege and the other is sexual frustration.
Lost privilege, what is this? It’s the sensation of loss that comes from seeing unconscious privilege questioned. In that great society of the past we remember, there was lots of privilege there for the victor nations of World War two. We got to set up global financial systems that were great for the global north and pretty impossibly challenging for the global south.
Loss of privilege can generate an unconscious rage of great intensity, and certainly this is one of the other breeding grounds we are seeing for grifter fascism.
The combination of changing gender dynamics, on-line dating maths for younger people and economic pressures are spawning a very angry frustrated cohort amongst young men, and visceral misogyny being deliberately exploited by grifters in the manosphere like Andrew Tait.
The very real demographic link between Trumpian dystopian politics and sexually frustrated young men having their rage harvested by grifters is delivering a potently dangerous cocktail of anger, misogyny and celebration of cruelty.
What can we do? As always, my best advice for everyone is stay embodied and touch grass. Fascism is a cult of performative cruelty, it destroys the societies it infects very quickly, it often takes a huge toll in bloodshed and collapse, but it is a system built on lies and distorted mental states. It doesn’t last and we need to stay grounded, stay embodied, hold our lived communities together and be able to both resist (as Minneapolis has been doing) and rebuild, as inevitably we will need to.
