I think it works on an exponential scale. The more power you get, the easier it is to become powerful.

Billionaires have reached some kind of "endgame" where they seem to have conquered every market there is to conquer so now they must keep their power. Rightists ideologies typically have a lot more control (read repression) over their populations.
Combine the two with bribes and corruptions.

Astroturfing, bots and opinion control on the web are a real thing.

Theses are my conclusions, but to be honest, I'm also surprised that they are gaining this much traction when we are approaching harder climatic conditions that are now directly affecting people.

Right wing popularity is fueled by anxiety and wealth inequality.

The idea that the right gains popularity after the left institutes left wing policies is a right wing talking point, not fact. Left leaning policies enjoy popular support across almost all policy domains because they benefit many, whereas right leaning policies benefit few.

Blaming left leaning policies in the US is especially laughable because there are none. Not since the end of the civil rights era. Gay marriage, that's it. And that really affects nothing compared to the impact of right wing policies like obamacare's empowering of insurance corps, forgiving corporate crimes as "too big to fail", forgiving US war criminals by not punishing them, etc. And that's just obama.

When people are scared, a slightly greater percentage will agree that taking resources from the disadvantaged is the easiest solution.

And when the rich command far far greater resources they can use them to overcome the popular resistance to policies that benefit them and disadvantage people in general.

Fear and rising wealth concentration.

No problem. Didn’t think it would be him, but was literally the only gray haired old Australian political activist I could think of.

This is stupid. Media had plenty of rightwing trash before "the 1990s"... And economics isn't a matter of "significant downturns" - which in a cyclical economy happen REGULARLY the problem is ACTUAL WEALTH DISPARITY has been on an increasing trajectory since the 1970s. We're talking about a long term trend of racheting up, not just a brief stint of "social media is bad now".

Wages vs productivity:

You can do something similar for median wages vs GDP:

And income inequality globally:

Same trend, relating to changes to the banking system in the 1970s and beyond:

• Alterations to monetary standards (petro dollar accounting).

• Increase to two working parents as a mortgage requirement rather than banks only requiring a single income.

• Deregulation of the banking system (Glass-stegal in America).

• Combined with repeatedly reducing income taxes on the wealthy (, ).

These are continuing and long term shifts that have made it easier for the wealthy to accelerate wealth, and be less morally culpable, whilst poorer people have consistently hit greater barriers, requirements, and burdens.

The idea it's "just the media is particularly bad right now" is stupid. Right wing media has always been prevalent and dogshit. Could not downvote your over simplification of the world more.

WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A CONSISTENT INCREASE IN SPECIFIC DISPARITIES.... Which then become economic pressures and grievances, which are then misdirected by the media. But the media IS NOT the cause. That's like pretending the symptom is the cause. It's just not the case.

Misinformation to the highest degree, constant propaganda seems to be the issue and the fact that a lot of civilians in Europe are uninformed how their government works. It doesn't help that the said left wing democrats have been failing at their jobs, and Europe's infrastracture can't even handle a influx of immigrants.

It doesn't also help that Europe also is quite racist in it's old age. The constant testimonies of visitors from America and many more places of darker skin tone, you'd be surprised to see how the Italians treat black people. Makes you think they learned from their American Cousins in hospitality.

Let me get this straight: the land that bred the fascist regime has racist elements???

Who would’ve guessed.

you’d be surprised to see how the Italians treat black people

Can it be worse than that of the Borgias, Medicis, Sforzas, Popes, etc. of the common people. And people wonder why Italy is a shithole with this sort of history? I’m with you on that one

General economic dissatisfaction combined with bucketloads of propaganda designed to point the ire of said dissatisfied people downwards instead of upwards.

You're literally linking to a graph that ONLY measures the wages of fully employed people in the US. It doesn't measure the under employed, part time employees, or contract/gig workers - at a time when all those categories all became more prevalent...

...and it certainly doesn't measure changes in wealth share globally. So way to cherry pick.

It's really not, each new age/epoch of media has had its share of rightwing grifters.

You don’t have to be right wing to spout hate speech. Modern Social media does have a lot of hate speech in any case (right wing grifters too, and yes there is some overlap, but there also isn't too).

I think it’s a combination TBH. Economy causes stresses and when financially stressed it can become easy to get anngry and blaming. Add to this successive govs in most eastern nations have abandoned the working class, it breeds resentment.

largely stupid humanity paired with interference from the usual suspects

Hate speach relates to hate crimes, which are a category of crime punching down on minorities specifically.

So do you want to show me the examples of left wing people spouting hate speech?

Show me what makes them not rightwing, in the same era as they were spouting the hate speech against minorities. Give some examples if you want me to see your point as true and correct.

Propaganda. The elite get people fighting a culture war instead of seeing what’s really happening: the continued funneling of wealth to the few.

Chuds noticing things getting worse, and their leader offering solutions and someone to blame. It's always been like that. Happened in Germany in the 1920s, happened in the US in the 2010s.

Now that it's accelerating, it's gonna be interesting to see which conclusions are drawn after their chosen ones have been in charge almost the entire time.

It's finally gotten to a point where wealth and power are concentrated into a sufficiently small enough group of people they can:

1. Collectively agree to all do the same thing
2. All benefit from their cooperative action
3. Afford to bribe as many officials as it takes to have complete control of any political system of their choosing
4. Wield enough of the world's resources that everyone else has no choice but to follow suit

I’m not disagreeing with your point from a legal definition, I’m just saying the far left can also spout venomous speech which, though it might not be considered ‘hate speech’ from a legal standpoint, can be as bad as in terms of its content.

I agree with the horseshoe theory — or, as Parker put it, people on the far left and far right are pretty much the same.

Then again, I guess it is, to some extent, a moot point, since anyone can spout venom if they are pushed hard enough regardless of left, right, above or beyond.

To me as a (jaded) centralist, it feels like the reason is a lack of action against societal issues and the far right always beating their chest saying "IM GONNA FIX EVERYTHING WITH AN IRON FIST!".

But they never seem to do and then the far left gains popularity saying "WE'RE GONNA DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY TO THEM" and then the main issues hang around. Then both sides aim their hate at each other rather than the parties, and then the cycle repeats years later.

If Texas is any indication, the right wingers just get dumber and keep voting to destroy their communities. 30+ years of single party control there and it just keeps getting worse.

I don't think that's the case, I think over the past several years a series of media figures have promoted right wing explanations of the world, almost all of which have relied on finding the most extreme examples of the worst people on the left, taking them out of context, and distributing them en mass in an organized fashion.

This process started with the "Russian troll farm" influence story in 2014, and was a huge part of the popularising of the alt-right. People like Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk also started running influence campaigns.

So we have these vestigial bad ideas and examples the vitriol of the left, like "big red", or this artist, or the screeching leftist, or this person.

These are then (as with that last example) combined with rightwing messages, or explanations about the left, citing the worst of them, to make memes and political propaganda.

Along with this comes things like horse shoe theory, the fourth turning theory (weak men create bad times ect), and things like "Post-modern Cultural Marxism caused all the problems".

This sort of popularization of bad ideas and misdirected grievances doesn't have to go on very long before society is left with a bunch of bad ideas, like feminism is hate speech against men (not saying this is your particular claim), or that poverty is caused by recent immigration rather than long term regulatory choices.

Long story short, due to the left having more reasonable explanations and models, in context and statistically there's far worse going on in the extreme "horse shoe" ends of the right, than in the left.

I guarantee you can find kidnap plans and migrant bashings by right wingers far more quickly and abundantly than you could anything like that on the left. It's drastically one sided.

Left wing rage is probably stronger, but it also tends to be better placed and more accurate.

So do I. But I'm uneducated pleb and need the edge. He's a legitimate PhD and could dispense with the verbosity and still be taken seriously. If it weren't for the distinct lack of anything of substance to say that isn't just more garbled attempts at clinging to the coattails of a fascist movement.

True, very true, it’s a trade-off, I guess.

I do think the far left can be just as unreasonable though (or could be, if given the means/opportunity). Possibly they don’t express/execute it as the far right does, which explains your point of view, which is completely valid also.

But I get your point: the far right has misconstrued the far left to some extent regardless. with media manipulation, etc.

True but I don't really see those as merely economic metrics, with the exception of income inequality. They're affected by many things, not all of which are part of the economy directly.

"CAN be just as unreasonable" still only requires potential one off cases though.

"ARE, and are with more regularity and in greater numbers, with more popularity, and with more risk of manifesting bad outcomes"... Are some more serious measures of comparison.

I mean you can kill people, but I think there are probably a lot of already existing active murder cases and violent abusers that are more concerning because they ARE ongoing threats.

So dealing with what is, and what is more likely, are the more realistic ways to process "both sides" style arguments.

You know, you don't want to sound like you're operating from petty one off bad interactions you've had with either side. There are bad people everywhere, it's numbers and concentration that counts.

Wut? Have you missed the associations between some wings of the left and anti-semitism?

Do you count being anti-israel as being antisemitic?

Outside of that conflation, I just haven't seen that much of it from the left, not in an age where we litterally have Nazi parties marching and trying to reform globally.

So I think PERSPECTIVE and SCALE are required for judging "right vs left" or "both sides" style arguments. There's way more right wing nazi stuff than "leftwing antisemitism".

in the case of the AFD, musk's money.

not political

you should be. you need to be. because otherwise the assholes win.

it's funny how last year everyone was blaming Americans for being "dumb white racist shitbags" while Americans were asking this same question.

welcome to the club assholes.

want to know what's driving fascist ideologies?

instability. poor governance. fear.

so the question becomes, who benefits the most when world leading countries begin to fall apart?

• Russia
• China
• Israel
• Corporate Interests / Banks

out of those four, who has the track record to run psyops at a worldwide scale. Who has a successful history of buying politicians? Who has the best ability to manipulate the world population without them knowing?

Okay, but we know the far right is in power in places...

So can you tell me where the far left are in power and:

and then the far left gains popularity saying "WE'RE GONNA DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY TO THEM" and then the main issues hang around.

Obviously giving the info on what the far left said they were going to do and that the problem is persistenting after they got into power, would be required.

Is that the main problem anywhere you can point to?

It just seems like a weird response, when the main concern of the post is right wing parties coming to prevalance. There are times when it's NOT "both sides" are extreme, and instead it's only one side posing the risk.

Could the rise of the far right in the West be a direct result of the neoliberalism consensus leading to declining quality of life while abandoning all of the values the west claimed to care about in order to justify it's self assigned "leader of the world" status?

No, a conspiracy of perfidious foreigners must be to blame.

but this explanation falls flat considering the lack of a significant economic downturn since the 1990s

....

How are people upvoting this? Wtf?

No it's not, it's a terrible explanation

Far right says "We found the issue with society: brown people"

(American) Far left says "We found the issue with society: the far right"

Far right followers are people who are susceptible to indoctrination.

(American) far left followers are people who think they arent susceptible to indoctrination.

No ones doing anything productive, but the far right IS doing SOMETHING, its just incredibly distructive and dick-waving.

Meanwhile something like 80% of people agree about 80% on 100% of topics. They just are too dumb or cowardly or poor to do anything about it (mainly poor).

The parties keep them poor and promise good things, the right is just louder and angrier and usually wins out the monkey brain

The rise of the far left.

4th wave feminism is a big one, for example.

As always these things feed off of each other.

The overall left has been very weak for the past decade. Some shift happened where the loudest left parties largely focused on identity politics and nearly ignored everything else the left is overall supposed to stand for.

Or to put it differently; the left gave nearly no resistance to the extreme elements of the right. So the most awful elements of the right could rise unopposed.

You had a rise in conservative movements starting in the 1970's as the post war economic boom stopped. The dismantling of various government services had short term benefits and long term costs. We're at the point where these groups are trying to cling on as it is becoming more apparent that new government economic intervention is needed for most people. A lot of wealthy people don't want to pay for this.

You also have new industries which formed and were very lightly regulated. Those who want to improve the economy also seem to want to institute effective regulation of these industries. Since typical conservatism has collapsed, the far right is being supported.

Everyone is political. Politics is where alternate perspectives intersect in a social setting. Everything in life that involves multiple individuals shaping a shared experience is politics, and so you cannot functionally be the thing you claim. To say "I'm not political" is actually to say "I am afraid of taking a stand, I can't handle conflict, and what I believe means less to me than the risks I fear for showing it". Be political, embrace having views and things you care about and being ready to advocate for them, stand for them, and act, because I promise you the people who don't believe your perspective matters or can be tolerated are acting on their beliefs.

Part of it comes from the failures of the left.

My response was dumbed down (why i mentioned jaded) but i gave my answer, which was generalised version of how the far right makes wild claims about instant action.

Im at work, im not gonna respond with a detailed essay, especially when many other people have posted more detailed comments.

Yeah, fuck that guy though. He's a grifting charlatan who played a direct role in this topic of discussion here by helping upend civil discourse with disingenuous sophistry. Also he's a degenerate drug addict who doesn't follow his own rules, since he just stole really common advice and pawned it off as revolutionary ideas. You mom told you to clean your fucking room for years and you ignored her, but some failed philosphy prof gets to be daddy for you because he work a funny suit and larped as and edgy joker boi? Pathetic. If that stings cause it's close to home as well as an accurate read on lobster king, fuck you too.

Yes, and none of them have been able to show where the far-left are in power, responsible, or the cause of far-right populism globally.

It's burning because the fuel exists. The fuel is the naturally dumb population. Since I was born, there have always been a large population of idiots. Maybe the upper class designed the lower classes to be that way, but there's at least 30% of the population that are absolutely unconscious, violent, immoral, and degenerate. They especially prevalent in the southern US states. I have no idea the history behind how their ancestors survived to produce them, but they are the bane of the united states.

There are foreign powers and corporate powers deliberately trying to foul up western democracies. They use social media as well as traditional media to spread hate, fear, anger and generally divide communities. The more they can divide us, the more control they can seize.

And utilizing nationalism, racism, bigotry in general... that's just a force multiplier. That's a technique that lets you influence a small number of people, and then that group of people continues to influence their communities.

It turns out that it's really easy to tip the scales toward chaos, hate and selfishness, it's easy to make people angry or scared. It's a lot easier to convince someone to blame someone else than to take responsibility for their own problems.

Now I’m not political

In large part, this is fueling it. Think. In what way are you not political? Are you uninformed about political topics-- important topics, that are life or death for others? Or are you informed but choose not to do anything about them? Neither option sounds too good when put more clearly than the very vague "not political". You can claim to be apolitical because you can afford not to care about politics; whoever gets elected, your life doesn't appear to change much. But rest assured, it does, and sooner or later politics will care about you, whether you care about it or not.

I'm concerned about what your opinion on that subject might be

Most of these answers lack a broader understanding of the history and systems which produce this phenomenon. There's a good video that talks through multiple examples of a similar rise in right wing populist dictators and the theoretical through-line that connects them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0GQP-IRVqM

To summarize: Privileged classes in a hierarchical society fear popular will turning against them and taking away their privilege, whether by election or force. When times are good the threat of this is relatively low. But when things start to fall apart, people start organizing against the elites. Fearing this, even liberal members of the upper class choose to side with those to their right, because even if they disagree with their more extreme positions, to them it's better than losing their privileged positions in society.

From there, the right wing uses all sorts of tactics to suppress opposition and cloak themselves in faux populism. Everything from propaganda to direct acts of violence.

Why is the right on the rise in a lot of these social democracies? Because they're still capitalist, so that structural need to suppress popular will still exists despite their nicer social programs. It was going to happen eventually, it's just a matter of when. Capitalism and imperialism around the world is reaching another moment of crisis, so this is exactly the time when they'd be doing this.

TL;DR: Surprise! It's capitalism again!

The mechanisms by which civilizations grow, stagnate, collapse and recover have fascinated people since at least the ancient Greek philosophers.

Civilizations initially grow because they make life better for the average citizen. Cooperation leads to more reliable food and more babies survive to make more babies.

After some time some stressors on the civilization lead to widespread conflict. Historically this have been linked mostly to famine and plagues. Economic instability can also lead to a civilizations segmentation and conflict. The "fall of civilizations" is historically the segmentation of large civilizations into smaller entities as people rally around a local leader who promises them the "right" things.

So what's happening right now - a shit ton of stressors.

Birth rates are negative in most industrialized nations. This indicates that on a widespread basis, globally people do not feel that they have the resources to raise kids.

Climate change is triggering serious fears of famine. This is why denying the obvious heat increases is so popular. "Oh no, it's not the hottest and dryest summer on record. Our crops are hunky doey."

Plagues - Well COVID happened and triggered a lot of widespread fear. That disease is still seen as a curse from the supernatural for most humans instead of a biological inevitability was made crystal clear.

Wars - stealing someone else's resources looks pretty good when you fear there is not enough resources to go around. "It's too hot in the U.S. to grow crops, let's invade Canada and steal Greenland!"

So humans are doing what they have always done when stressed. Look for someone who looks like a "strong leader" who can make things right in their world again.

Selfishness,
Greed
"Got mine fuck off", desperatly, they want to feel like they have power and are in the 'in group', russian and chinese money