With the exception of Hungary, the graphs don't look to me like a "swing to the right" so much as a "swing to the margins"; the centrist parties are losing votes to both "far right" and "other" parties.
I'd say there are more exceptions. Every country seems to be bit different in who loses to whom. In Poland left-wing parties lost mostly to centrist parties, and right wing party just gradually gains support since its first rise to prominence.
As Austrian, i am really glad about outcome of yesterdays election - still it was a really close one. And you are right - freedom party is far right imho - but they down-play that them selfs and gain a lot votes from people who are upset about the fact that the two big center parties didn't get any shit done in the last few years. And they have gotten good in playing that - just look at trump - telling the rage people what they want to here - even if it sounds irrational or are plain lies - just seems to work.
As a a simple example, here in the UK the current Labour leadership is a throw-back to hard-left Labour and UKIP continues to gather support on the right. The current center-right Tories have enough support to govern and it looks like it will be at least another election cycle before center-left Blairites are in a position to challenge. Like US politics, sometimes changes at the upper levels can simply be the avalanche effect from a few shifts at the edges of the electorate.
And _in principle_ I'd say that's a good thing. If all we have is a bunch of parties crowded around the center, there isn't anything left for voters to choose.
I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
If all we have is a bunch of parties crowded around the center, there isn't anything left for voters to choose.
Yes and no. The median voter theorem suggests that voters' choices were accounted for as parties put their platforms together -- effectively, voters chose, but not when they thought they were choosing.
I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
I think there's a problem caused by voters swinging to margins, no matter which margins they swing to: It increases the gap between the voters and their government (either because extremist voters don't like a moderate government, or because one group of extremists hate a differently-extreme government), which diminishes public confidence in the state. Much like a lack of confidence in the justice system, a lack of confidence in the state tends to have very negative consequences, as people "take matters into their own hands".
But there is always only so many topics any one party and median voter agrees on. Many don't really adopt party identity and live by it. So having only few big parties is likely to cause distrust to political parties in general, because nobody accurately represents you. Which ought to translate to distrust to goverment as the big players have the power.
Does it help if you have someone who accurately represents you, but she is marginalised within the legislature and has no chance of ever being part of the government? If anything, I'd expect that to make you trust the government even less.
Note that I'm from a country where there are always 10+ parties in parliament, and governments are always formed by coalitions. The median voter theorem assumes 2 parties trying to get a majority.
Their standpoints get watered down a lot already after the election when they need to negotiate coalitions, I'd prefer if they were further apart beforehand so it would be easier to make the choice.
You're right, the charts don't show that. But the charts don't tell the actual story.
Which is that all centrist parties have shifted right in their policy positions and rhetoric.
The charts only show power shifts between parties, but ignore shifts within parties. There's a lot of centrist parties that were rooted in Christian values for example, that were reasonable on e.g. refugee issues in the 20th century (which were much more significant than today, by the way), that now want to amend laws, retract long-standing treaties, create walls and border fences, disallow schooling/work/status for those refugees who do get welcomed so as to send them right back asap in god knows when Syria recovers from being a failed state, paired with hints of xenophobic rhetoric akin to a far right party. Yet they're still deemed centrist parties, and would not show it on the chart.
And that is precisely because the far right is on the rise, and the rest of the political spectrum is adjusting and compromising their stance, so as not to lose votes. That's a very clear shift to the right.
Like take the Netherlands, it shows a drop in the right-wing PVV's size since 2010 (forget for a moment that the party's currently leading in the polls). You'd think, alright no shift to the far right here at all. What it doesn't tell you is that the current biggest party (a non far right wing, right wing party) has shifted much more to the right. Like recently we saw it's 2nd in command claim refugees were visiting the Netherlands to get plastic surgery, breasts corrections, face lifts etc... I mean this guy is just a ridiculous demagogue, instilling fear into the Dutch population that Syrian refugees aren't actually running away from a gruesome war, but are merely looking to exploit our medical system to get plastic surgery, it's insane. If you'd have set this about jews during the holocaust there'd be no discussion, you'd recognised as a clear far-right fascist. And this is the biggest party's 2nd in line, straight out the playbook of a far right-wing demagogue.
Now this party isn't far-right for all intents and purposes, but it has very much shifted towards it on various policy positions and rhetoric, as have many centrist and right wing parties. And none of that shows up in the charts.
Interesting to note that Spain, Portugal & Germany, countries with a long and famous history of right-wing dictatorships, are some of the countries that fare best. And Italy, also with a similar history, is seeing its right-wing party support go lower on each election. Only Britain and Czech Republic fare similarly well. Although me being Spanish I can say that while we may not have any party in congress "openly extreme right" (nazi like etc), our Partido Popular, one of our top 2 parties and currently in power, is definitely right wing and a direct descendant of franquism (dictatorship), since many of the top dogs in the party were ministers with Franco himself. In other words, here in Spain the right wing successfully camouflaged itself as democrat as to apparently mislead anyone that we don't have a problem here, when we actually do. Maybe the situation in Italy and Portugal is the same, I don't know. I'm also surprised to find out that while Golden Dawn's rise in Greece was all over the media as "the new rise of nazism etc", other countries have MUCH higher rates of right wing parties and nobody seems to care.
Austria had Hitler. Now they have a party that has - presumably deliberately - making subtle links back to those days e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36342362
1. what percentage of the population turns out to vote in Austria?
2. what level of education is most common in Austria?
I have a hard time believing well educated people turn out in droves to vote for the hard right - I mean sure, there is always a percentage and many fiscally conservative people come from money so they tend to be educated, but as I understand it, that's not what they were voting for in Austria, they were basically voting for social conservatism which is anti-immigration, etc.
Then again that percentage is pretty much what the US faces in every Red vs Blue presidential election in the past half-century.
1. There are 6.382.507 eligible voters, of which 4.643.154 have voted, thats 72,7%. [1]
2. The ORF did a survey, where it turned out, that 76% of people who have an education of a-level or higher voted for the left-wing candiate. Only 38% of the people with education less than a-level voted for the left-wing candiate. [2]
Keep in mind that in EU countries, people may often vote more "emotionally" than logically. People know that EU and NATO act as a shield, so whichever government is in control , there will always be a level of "protection" from crazy endeavors. (e.g. look how people vote in greece). I am certain that, without EU or NATO, people would think twice about where they vote.
It's not just the EU, in the US Trump enjoys a huge "emotional" support as people vote from what they "feel" has been happening to the country vs reality. They get double their emotional return because they feel like he also thinks with his emotions, aka "gut feeling" about everything instead of actually being educated about it.
In the US, middle-class and low-income are NOTORIOUS for voting against themselves, election after election after election, putting right-wing policy in place that basically crushes them slowly. Kansas is a textbook study of the final outcome of such behavior.
I call it "f\\k your neighbor voting" because people don't see it as voting against themselves at all but rather they hate their neighbors so much they think these policies will make others suffer and that makes them satisfied.
I don't think nearly 50% vote means you dodged any bullets. I wonder if you think this was due to a knee-jerk reaction to the recent immigration crisis , or something that you believe will continue after the next election.
They do not fare very well though, right? the problem with southern europe countries is corruption i believe. Dictatorships lowered the extent of corruption because they limit it to a very small part of the population. The problem is not democracy, but the lack of other checks and balances that make up a well-functioning state. Also Germany went through economic miracles under democratic governments.
Oddly i am not worried by the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties. They attract the "vote of demonstration", but i don't bevieve the general public really wants to go through the 1930s again.
With Trump and Sanders in the US, Brexit in Britain and the rise of what's being called the "far right" in Europe, we're seeing a referendum on globalism.
The pendulum swings back and forth and this move shouldn't be surprising to anyone who reads history. People who believe in a Fukuyama-style 'end of history' scenario are shocked that nationalism is bubbling up again, but it is a natural correction. Local governance, culture and economy have a de facto legitimacy among people that de jure unions never will.
The Left's challenge is to acknowledge this and help create a framework for a peaceful world of disparate cultures and loose alliances.
I wouldn't say it's globalism per se. More that in a recession everyone looks for someone to blame. It's far easier to blame "those dirty foreigners" than it is to accept the vagaries of economics. Or that maybe the blame is almost entirely on ourselves.
It's a kind of fundamental attribution error [1]. People are very quick to blame others for their personal characteristics ie. lazy foreigners (personal), no good scroungers of welfare (personal), instead of the situational context of recession/war/etc. Whereas when it comes to talking about themselves, they're hard working people who just can't get a break (situational), the recession is at fault (situational), no education because my teachers were bad and the school was crap (situational), the foreigners took our jobs (situational)...
>I wouldn't say it's globalism per se. More that in a recession everyone looks for someone to blame.
It's also globalism. It took jobs abroad and fucked up the working class royally -- and it didn't do much for the middle class either, which is also shrinking. The idea of a totally open market is bad if you also want to secure what you have here and now. Of course it makes big bucks for the rich doing the "opening" part (and keeping the market rigged in 100 other ways), so economists, one of the most whored out "scientific" professions, always sitting next to those in power as advisors, will just blab about how beneficial it is.
How ironic. Have you considered that maybe people who vote for certain parties may have good reasons for it? I don't like those parties either, but saying people vote for them simply because people are stupid racists is ridiculous. You're pathologizing people who have opinions that you don't like while most likely not actually having spoken with them and talked about what they think and why they think it. It's easier to blame "those dirty racists" than it is to accept the vagaries of reality.
Not ironic at all, just coincidence. Of course there are situations out of our control like recession and war. But blaming others doesn't actually fix anything. All that anti-globalisation will do is massively raise prices on everything.
In my grandfathers era, a working man would have two sets of clothes, one for work and one for sunday best. Nowadays, even the poorest in a western society have a plethora of clothing. That is down to cheap chinese labour.
You can't get round it; if you raise tariffs, you end up with expensive chinese clothes. If you then build your own factories and bring it back onshore, you end up with expensive western-made clothes. The people may have good old-fashioned industrial jobs, but they can no longer afford to live. And that's before you even get into retaliatory tarriffs, where our high-price items suddenly lose half their export market. How much of Apple's revenue growth over the last few years has been from iPhone sales in China?
Because the original comment I responded to was about globalism. My response assumed that talking about Trump and globalism was dog-whistling for the less pleasant elements of society and so touched on both racism and real economic issues.
> My response assumed that talking about Trump and globalism was dog-whistling for the less pleasant elements of society
Yes, and my response was precisely about that assumption, which is really a different issue than economic policies like tariffs for China. This doesn't just apply to the reaction to Trump, but also to the reaction to the (supposed) rise of the right in Europe, the main topic. The assumption that these people are voting like that because they're stupid and racist is going to kill the left.
Well, actually you were the one to call them "stupid racists", there was no mention of it in my original comment. I was pointing out that people are quick to blame the personal failings of others, "lazy welfare scroungers" rather than debate the actual economic issues behind globalism.
Come on, your whole comment was about people being stupid and racist. Here's one line: "It's far easier to blame "those dirty foreigners" than it is to accept the vagaries of economics.". The rest was very much in the same spirit. Entertain the idea that if people vote in a way that you don't like, it might not necessarily be for reasons that are irrational and bigoted. Rather than analysing their supposed psychological pathologies to explain why they have a different opinion than yourself, maybe just talk to them? I'd ask somebody who says "those dirty foreigners" the same question: why not talk to them? Perhaps they turn out to be decent people after all.
Nope, original comment was nothing to do with stupidity or racism, just human nature that it's easier to lay the blame abroad rather than look inward.
I know and have debated many people on differing sides of the UK/EU referendum here in England. None of them I consider to be stupid or racist. But they are blaming Europe for all of Britain's woes instead of looking inward. The EU is a net benefit, but just last week we've had otherwise intelligent people scaremongering about Turkey joining the EU and hundreds of thousands of Turkish people swarming the border. It's a crass and absurd lie, and it's downright manipulative.
I never claimed any kind of "psychological pathology" either. That would imply mental illness which is not correct at all. I mentioned a very common human trait which we're almost all guilty of at some point or other.
You seem to enjoy putting a lot of words in my mouth that I never said. I think I'll end this here rather than waste my time attempting debate.
I have not put any words in your mouth. Instead of considering that the opposing side may have good reasons for their opinions, you analysed their psychology as racist and stupid. I see this attitude a lot, but particularly on the left, which I consider myself most aligned to. I'm afraid the left is currently in the process of killing itself by not taking working class people seriously. "Champagne left" has never been more salient. The solution to this is not even more demonizing of people who don't vote "correctly".
The trend is not toward blame - it is toward cultural and economic locality. It's ok to have a preference to live in a place where you can drink and stay out at clubs all night, and it's ok to have a preference toward living in a place where you can't drink or socialize with the opposite sex at all.
The problem comes from trying to merge all cultures instead of considering that there can be different cultures for different places. That would be a better multiculturalism than what we currently call multiculturalism.
I'm just so fed up with dog-whistle politics, of which anti-globalisation is one. ie. You mentioned Trump in the first sentence and then talked about globalisation being the problem, which is usually just a dog-whistle politics talking point for blaming foreigners for everything.
Likewise with multi-culturalism. Usually when people bring that up in a debate, it's followed by some sort of "We must pull up the drawbridge" kind of xenophobia.
I absolutely agree that there are some incompatible cultures out there. The middle east refugee crisis is highlighting quite a few of them. We should absolutely do more to integrate people into our culture when they arrive on our shores. But the solution isn't to say, "your culture, in your place", because as with the refugee crisis, they don't always stay in their place.
The solution is to get tougher on regimes and people that still think these barbaric practices are acceptable.
I hope you see the issue with seeing things in terms of "dog-whistle politics." It washes over legitimate concerns and narrows the Overton Window. Some (not all) people who call out dog-whistles are conscious of that effect and they use it as a weapon.
Ideally we could have a debate about whether it is acceptable for small groups of people to create and enforce local cultures provided people can make choices about whether to participate in those cultures or not. I don't think we are mature enough to do that yet.
Yeah I agree with your second point. Society isn't ready for consenting multi-culturalism, the idea that someone might actually like something you find barbaric is a difficult one.
As to your first point, calling out dog whistles may be extreme, but it's only a response to the extreme absolutism of public figures calling for "No muslims allowed. No Mexicans allowed. No Chinese goods. Build a wall, etc.".
They could propose sensible options like cultural integration courses. Limited immigration from acceptably similar countries. Maybe even remember the foundational concept of freedom of religion... But while they're still pandering to the extremes, I'll still call it dog whistling.
I haven't heard any of the anti-immigration people to actually complain about no jobs. I have heard lots of academics speculating that the problem is no jobs.
What the anti-immigration people are actually complaining? Loss of security. Not now, but possibly in the future. Not to themselves, but their families and social groups.
Now if we look at IPCC raports about global warming and speculate what might happen to populations? Probably mass migration. When has that ever went down smoothly? Pretty valid concerns if you ask me. It's just that the timescales are off by few decades. And also some of the most hideous acts in history we're made "to pre-emptively stop X", so they don't really get my support.
They are absolutely valid concerns, but when people talk about the problems of globalisation or multi-culturalism, they usually follow it up with talk about building walls and pulling up drawbridges.
Take the climate change induced migration example; having millions of starving desperate people on the other side of a wall (literal or metaphorical), is not going to be a pretty situation. It's the classic philosophy problem: If your child is starving to death, would you steal a loaf of bread? Or would you watch them die?
By building walls, you're forcing that decision on millions of refugees. Would you blame anyone for their actions in such a situation? By pushing people away we're only kicking the can down the road, it will only ever get worse. Whereas if we show compassion and show them how great our society is, maybe they'll realise that it's our way of life that gives us these good things. It's hard to call someone the devil when they're being nice to you. When was the last time we were nice to anyone in the middle east outside Israel?
I think it's fundamentally trust issue and identity issue bundled together.
There is 2000km between Germany and Syria. People in Syria are different group than desendants of Syrians in Germany. German govermnent is different than most individual native germans. Nobody has to abide by any rules or agreements, it just happens that currently some rules make sense for large majority. For now. Someone being nice to someone else doesn't exactly guarantee anything to anybody else.
I think the walls are completely meaningless in every sense. They don't make anybody terrorist, refugee or safe.
Compassion might just as well show them that we are foolish. Violence might just show them that we have loot to protect. It's hard to call someone devil when they are nice to you, but it's still relatively easy to be asshole yourself.
I advocate pretty much just two things. Dropping less bombs to middle east and cutting social security form refugees. That should fight the root causes of current immigration in short/medium term.
Yes, those are very good points. Another is that the current refugee crisis is as much a crisis about quantity as about culture.
We've had plenty of situations in the past where significant migration has occurred, Indians to Britain, Turkish to Germany, Irish/Italians/etc. to America. But they've all managed to eventually integrate well because no-one gave up on them.
The major difference as I see it today is that it's a question of quantity. How do you successfully integrate a million Syrians?
Old fashioned slow integration (watch and wait) worked because people for the large part, genuinely wanted to be in their new country. With the refugees that's not necessarily the case.
Europe is bunch of nation states. Which means that language and race/ethnicity are founding parameters of the most fundamental and powerfull social construct on the continent. If you get 1% of immigrants, they are just guests. But 20% would be very problematic to the national identity, because they don't fit in to the matrix of ethnicity and language. But you can't treat them as non significant "other" anymore because they are everywhere all the time.
So it's also a speed/integration problem. Most Brits don't mind "Normans" anymore. Many Estonians have beef with the very significant Russian minority that migrated after WWII.
Of course current immigration is not anykind of actual problem. It's just that people are afraid of escalation and politicians seem incapable of actually doing anything.
I'm just assuming your an American? I partially agree that our some people do abuse this attribution error.
That said, there's still a lot of folks, like myself who blame one sided dubious trade agreements(with job programs that didn't target the areas of the country hit hardest. The federal money was dolled out to all states? "We will let you pass NAFTA, but you must retain, or pass on money to social programs, or retrain workers?" We have over 400 retaining programs. There's no real oversize. And what are we retracing people to do? Coding--come on. Coding takes on a certain personality type, and intelligence.
I've never been ok with building products in the lowest wage/regulation countries.
I've never been ok with lobby groups dictating what government officials would do. Dictating bills that politicians don't read.
I'm not fond of countries that dump dump product on our shores, just to decimate industries. Ex. Steel.
I find it crazy that foreigners can pick up the phone and by my nextdoor neighbor's house, and leave it empty.
I don't like currency manipulation.
As to the foreigners taking our jobs. I don't know. I know chit jobs are truely chit jobs now. I remember guys in the 79-80's who got out of serving a correctional term. A lot would start up gardening service, including tree trimming/removal, and slowly get an an apartment, and then a house. Those days are over. I remember guys opening up independent automotive shops, those days are over. My point is there use to be jobs that felons could start up. I can't think of a sigle one, that hasen't been completely taking over by foreigners. There use to be so many chit jobs employers would make exceptions and hire a felon. Again those jobs are practically gone.
I do blame an immigration policy that lets people break the law. I don't care about foreign illegal workers. I care about the corporations/individuals who don't get prosecuted for hiring them.
I blame this free Fed money, that guys like me have no access to. I understood the no interest rate policy of the FED after 2008; I don't understand it now. Poor poeople put there savings in banks, and rely on healthy 5 percent interest rates. We put our money on cd's.
I'm not blaming conservatives, or liberals. If I was president, I would get rid of 50 percent of government regulation on day one. I would keep an eye on certain industries though, like the Pharmaceutical, and any industry that hurts the enviorment.
I sound like a Trump fan? No--I'm not. I don't trust the man. I belive the Health Care Act is too important in principle to just get rid of. I don't trust he will appoint the right judges. I just don't trust him.
So, yes I agree that people lash out at what's conveinient, or a seemly easy target--the Attribution error?
I do think that poor people, people with no support(family, or didn't network like a cheerleader, or otherwise.) have some legitimate gripes. I don't think these grips are just psychological projection.
(I look at our GDP and cringe. I look at our foreign exchange rate, and I believe it was -15 percent? That's, I believe the lowest it's been since WW2?)
I do wish I moved to France once I got out of college. I had a chance, and didn't go. I just like the way they think. I like what they seem to value.
The Left's response is to call anyone from a mildly concerned citizen to a full out racist the same thing.
That was probably very rightist of me, but I'm currently very frustrated at the level of the debate here in Europe. Even legitimate concerns (on both sides) are responded to (by both sides) with polarizing s*.
> The Left's challenge is to acknowledge this and help create a framework for a peaceful world of disparate cultures and loose alliances.
The left/right distinction doesn't work very well there. Social democrats are often "big state", while there are several socialist ideologies that want either no state or extremely minimalist states (e.g libertarianism was originally a far left ideology - right wing libertarianism is a recent phenomenon).
The "world" is voting against allowing large unchecked migration to drastically that scares people and/or changes their local areas in ways they are uncomfortable with first and foremost.
My neighbours are a good example. I live in the UK. My ex is black African, and I'm Norwegian. Our neighbours are far right.
Yet they've always been nice to us. If politics ever comes out, one of the first things that gets said is "but not you". They have black and asian friends, despite supporting a party that wants to deport all non-anglo-saxons. It's always about the scary "others" that they worry are stealing their jobs ("but not you") until they get to know they. People who meet them quickly recognise that, hence why they have friends who come to their house who you'd think might have wanted nothing to do with them.
It's not about race, or culture, or religion per se. It's that they're afraid of how change will affect them.
In the UK, we see this clearly reflected in voting patterns too: The racist and/or anti-immigration candidates do best in the areas with the lowest or very highest amount of immigration: The areas where this is an abstract fear and most people have no friends who aren't white-British, and the usually deprived areas where there's a core of poor white people feeling under siege.
The best way to counter these attitudes, it seems, is moderate levels of immigrants spread out more. Of course that would take a lot of investment in redistributing social housing and building more affordable housing in wealthier areas - ultimately this is a socio-economic problem first and foremost.
I think it's cheap to assume people are acting out of fear when it could just simply come down to what they like and don't like. If you and your ex behaved in a way that altered their living conditions they might have moved. That pattern occurs in many areas with high immigration. Not everyone likes the same cultural mores.
I'm assuming you and your ex weren't that different and you weren't part of enough difference in the neighborhood for rightists to vote with their feet. But there are thresholds and they have nothing to do with fear.
I don't think it is cheap at all, because it is based explicitly on what they and others with similar views have told me to my (and my ex's) face. The issue of fearing for their jobs comes up time and time again. The issue of fear of crime comes up time and time again.
Cultural factors rarely if ever.
I'm sure there are people for whom cultural factors also play in, but personally I've yet to meet any face to face.
The graph for Britain is clearly wrong. David Cameron is clearly far-right by any European standard, so the country's swing to the right should be a lot more pronounced.
Hmm, I wouldn't place Cameron as far-right. He's in charge of a right wing party with a large minority of far right members, but he's actually fighting his own party to stay in Europe. So Right, but not Far-Right.
The far-right in the UK is UKIP and a bunch of Conservatives who are basically UKIP, but don't want to risk losing their seat by jumping ship.
By the standards of some European countries, Obama is far-right, but Obama becoming president was certainly not a sign of a shift to the right in American politics.
What matters here is where parties and politicians lie compared to the historical norms of their country, and Cameron is far closer to that then, say, Thatcher.
How the parties are positioned depends indeed on the country. As an example, on our case in France, there is the "Front de Gauche" which would probably be considered communist in the US/UK whereas on our case, we have the actual communists, in the traditional sense. Religion also plays close to no parts in politics and conservative and republican means a very very different thing. Most of the English news I see report quite wrongly on the subject.
cameron far-right? you're joking surely? if you truly believe this it just shows how shockingly far left we have gone that cameron is considered right wing at all.
By right the writer means extreme right wing. Lot of right parties (PdL in Italy, VVD in NL, ...) are not listed in that category (and least not in the fancy charts)
On the other hand, in the French chart "DivD" is listed as far right when it's just a collection of non-affiliated right-wing candidates going from center-right to far-right.
The charts are rubbish. Not only it lists e.g. parties with "socialist" in their name as "centrist", but they didn't do a "left-wing" colour to begin with, so e.g. communists parties are "other". That's not very balanced...
I wonder how they decided how to color each party. In Europe right-wing/left-wing are not as sharp terms as in US where these labels have been curated and polished for many decades.
It's not that weird - it just reflects history. Norway as well as a centre-right party called Venstre and a right wing/conservative party called Høyre ("right"). In our case it dates straight back to the fight over parliamentarism in Norway, and the left/right naming took inspiration directly from the origin of the left/right axis in the aftermath of the French revolution (where those seated to the left were those against the monarchy and those seated to the left were supporters of the monarchy), so the most monarchy friendly party was "obviously" right wing.
The name first started looking weird when the Labour Party (then revolutionary socialists, now social democrats) was formed well to their left, followed by further splits up until todays situation where there are - depending on how you place two of the more centrist parties - between four and six parties to the left of Venstre in Norway, counting parties that have or have had a member of parliament at some point. I don't know the history of the Danish party names, but I'm expecting it is a similar history of very literally being the left when formed only to have the balance shift substantially to the left since.
The US colour use is different in that it was simply a matter of not taking historic use of the colours into account and arbitrarily applying it in election broadcasts, only to have it stick.
The roots of blue meaning liberal and red meaning conservative in the U.S. date back to the 2000 Presidential election, and Bush v. Gore. By accident media outlets standardized that year, picking from the colors of the flag. And because talk whether a state turned red or blue (winner take all by state election == electoral college) stretched on for weeks, it stuck in the popular psyche.
"Far right" has become a synonym for racist/anti-immigration, but it's important to note that many of these parties aren't actually right wing parties in any other sense.
Parties like "Dansk Folkeparti" in Denmark is pretty much Social Democrats, except they are harder on immigration. Leaving out the anti-immigration part, I would say that most of these parties are still to the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US.
Claiming an inherent inferiority of a group of people or advocating for a seperate set of laws to be carved out, that's racism. For instance, police profiling or apartheid are real world, dictionary defined "racist" things.
Using offensive language or mentioning someone by they're physical description is not. It's at best rude, but it's not a "racist" act.
On the contrary, racism often comes on the backs of calm language with charts and graphs.
There are many issues with the one-dimensional left-right scale, but it is undeniable that they are right-wing in their strong social conservatism and nationalism. Note that there are also differences within these parties.
An excellent example would be the Sweden Democrats, where a portion of the party is very much like what you describe, somewhat social democrat. While their youth organisation recently had a hard split due to its leader ship being essentially neo-fascist, which proved to be anathema for the main party.
>There are many issues with the one-dimensional left-right scale, but it is undeniable that they are right-wing in their strong social conservatism and nationalism.
The USSR was conservative socially and nationalistic.
Those are by no means a sign of being "right wing".
Stalin was considered right-wing by other communists, and the mainstream Communist Party would often be described as such by those who lived in the Soviet Union.
I'm not sure if Orwell actually used the term for the Stalinist Communist Party but he definitely had a problem with their anti-revolutionary stance in, for example, the Spanish Civil War.
But even this is problematic. In some cases it's purely a historical accident that certain views have been bundled together. There's no innate coherent ideology at work - despite attempts to construct one.
USSR was not nationalistic, it was trying to stomp out any signs of nationalism in fact. Up to 1940s the party viewed its population as mere expendable material to jump start world revolution; only after WW2 Stalin wound Komintern movement down.
Social conservative is questionable too. The churches were burnt down and the old elites massacred. At the earliest period abolishment of family was seriously discussed (per the tenets of the Manifesto). The shakedowns arguably settled only after 1960s.
It sure was. It tried to play down internal factions of course, but it used to the full such terms as Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ "Great Patriotic War" or РОДИНА "Rodina", and if you look at the propaganda posters, they look remarkably similar to those of the Nazis.
Soviet leadership destroyed churches as the church was a competing power base. But otherwise the Stalinist system was in many ways socially conservative. Look at its attitudes towards homosexualism, or ethos of work morale.
Zeitgeist, my dear friend. It wasn't Stalin who castrated Alan Turing, and work ethos was very much prevalent in all industrialized world.
Great Patriotic War and other reversals of Tzarist times (rank system in the army, the concept of motherland etc) did not appear until months into the conflict. Before 1940s you could be hard pressed to find even a mention of "Soviet state", it wasn't really on conceptual radar. After WW2 there were no celebrations of GPW. Not until 1970s when Brezhnev had to create lore for himself: V day wasn't even a holiday.
Propaganda posters had more to do that both were totalitarian, socialist regimes, so there's little wonder.
When my father had his 3 year tour to Afghanistan it was called "serving the internationalist duty". In my pretty average school education there was definite accent on nationalism as an awful thing. So I respectfully disagree.
> The USSR was conservative socially and nationalistic.
The USSR was the opposite of conservative - they were extremely progressive. In the attempt to make a new man, they tried to crush all conservative values such as religion, family (with children encouraged to denuonce their parents) or sexual restraint (free love, contraception and abortion were allowed in USSR decades before the West's sexual revolution).
As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
>The USSR was the opposite of conservative - they were extremely progressive. In the attempt to make a new man, they tried to crush all conservative values such as religion, family (with children encouraged to denuonce their parents) or sexual restraint (free love, contraception and abortion were allowed in USSR decades before the West's sexual revolution).
That was also in the revolution's early 1-2 decades.
The USSR turned much more conservative in the 30s and onwards -- including in surprising fields like science. Even arts, which were playing with new forms early one, were afterwards heavily regulated and directed to be towards more classical and petit-bourgeois aesthetic ideals (heroic/lyrical music as opposed to experiments like Stravinsky etc, same for painting etc).
Same for other areas of life -- e.g. homosexuality was soon again an issue, abortion was made illegal again in 1936 (and legal again, but much less touted in the mid-fifties), etc. And of course social norms were encouraged to be conservative and held back, with extra emphasis on hard work, the duty of the citizen, etc. (e.g. Stakhanovites). Most early progressive or anti-family laws were again repealed in the thirties and onwards.
Of course such a regime change also brought some new social conventions and broke some old, like the break with religion.
>As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
The nationalism was for "mother USSR", which was not much different from the great Russia (before and after). Hence the strained relationships with Ukraine or Georgia (still nationalistic under that context).
The original Fascism (as well as National-Socialism aka Nazism) was quite hot on certain forms of socialism -- Mussolini was originally a socialist. They advanced welfare, were not shy about nationalising industries, and were in fact quite good for large sectors of the population -- hence their popularity in spite of violence and otherwise appalling beliefs.
The establishment in both Italy and Germany originally built alliances with these movements only because they were seen as "better than the reds", because of their nationalism and belief in strong hierarchies (whereas socialists and communists were internationalist and against hierarchies back then). They didn't necessarily like a lot of their social programs.
Leaving out the anti-Jewish thing, Hitler and Mussolini were very much on the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US (today as well as yesterday).
Exactly. Nazi stands for "national socialism", exploiting our tendency towards ingroup/outgroup thinking combined with financial advantages and a strong feeling of belonging and purposes for the members of the ingroup, at the expense of some minority.
Its historically interesting though that the capitalists were generally supporters of the nazi party, even before the times of slave labour and war time profits. I guess social darwinism was a good match for the capitalist competition mindset.
Instead of elaborating why the tired "Nazi stands for 'national socialist'" meme is irrelevant I'll just link to the early history of the DAP/NSDAP (the Nazi Party) on Wikipedia:
To summarize: they were initially just called the "German Worker's Party" and had a strong basis in the middle-class. They weren't interested in socialism (i.e. social ownership of capital) but merely in profit sharing (i.e. paying workers better). Their leaders were nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist pretty much from day one -- which is also why they were categorically opposed to communists and other (anti-national or non-nationalist) socialists.
The entire party can be explained as a radical reaction to the fallout from WW1 in Germany: economy in ruins, political lack of power, basically Euro-crisis Greece but significantly worse because everybody hated them and there wasn't an international union trying to fix them.
The reason capitalists liked the NSDAP was that there literally wasn't much capitalisting to do in Germany without first re-asserting Germany's political (and military) power in Europe -- and that's one of the main things the NSDAP tried to do. Though I'm sure Jewish or non-anti-Semitic (remember: before WW2 anti-Semitism was socially acceptable) capitalists weren't too thrilled about the rampant anti-Semitism.
I cannot speak for right wing parties in general, but "Dansk Folkeparti" is very much like social democrats on paper, but their votes reveal a different, right-leaning agenda (to the detriment of a big portion of their voters who are voting for someone to take care of the "little people").
I think racist and anti-immigration are two different things. Most racists probably are against immigration, but not everybody who is against immigration is racist.
These parties are definitely socially conservative. Just check what they think about same-sex marriage. Dansk Folkeparti is also against the separation of church and state.
When you really look at it, it's about greed vs empathy. I think most left-right political beliefs fall nicely on that spectrum, even if they don't seem to at first.
On the very far left everything is totally fair and each person does what they can to help everyone else (in theory). Then you have the more reasonable left, where welfare systems help the less fortunate, because it's the moral thing to do.
As you move toward the right you start to see people wanted to keep what they have for themselves, hence low taxes, and no spending state money no helping others (e.g. Obamacare). Finally in the very far right you have people who don't even want to share their country. They were born there thank you very much and fuck you if you weren't.
Just as the VVD, a right-wing liberal party is marked as center-left center-right. But if those are marked as center. Same with left wing parties, which show up as 'other'
The VVD is traditionally right-wing, but I think the article uses "right-wing" here to mean "extreme right" or perhaps "new right" or "non-traditional right" or whatever you would call it. Not sure really...
What seems to be happening in the background is an increasing divide between rural and urban areas, where the rural areas vote for populist right-wing politicians (Trump, FPÖ, AfD, Front National) while the urban areas vote for left wing (in the European sense) or liberal (in the US sense) parties. Most illustrative for this are the results of sunday's Austrian presidential elections, where the voters had to choose between a right-wing, populist candidate (in blue) and a left-wing, liberal candidate (in green):
http://derstandard.at/2000037433421/Ab-1700-Hochrechnungen-u...
Overlay it with a map of Austria and the rural areas voted very strongly for the right-wing candidate while the larger cities (Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz,...) voted for the green candidate. I'd really like to find the chance to overlay the last elections results for UKIP, Sweden Democrats, Trump, AfD etc. with population density maps.
These demographics underline an interesting shift in Left and Right across the west. The Left used to align itself with the working class, struggling against capital. Now it aligns with the cosmopolitan and against the unsophisticated.
In the US there has been a flight toward cities, increasing the numbers of people with a cosmopolitan perspective. These demographics are worth watching.
> The Left used to align itself with the working class, struggling against capital. Now it aligns with the cosmopolitan and against the unsophisticated.
Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of reasons.
These populations aren't what you'd consider traditionally "cosmopolitan" or "sophisticated" by any means. I mean, a voting base of cosmopolitans wouldn't really be enough to win an election anyway.
There's a reason the GOP is trying really, really hard to win over more Hispanic voters lately.
If you're arguing that minority populations are voting for the Left in spite of the Left being aligned with the elite, that's a fairly gross mischaracterization.
> Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of reasons.
There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner. Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.
> There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner.
I'd argue mostly the opposite. There's a shift underway, but I don't think it'll be to the GOP's benefit. Fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are slowly starting to realize they're very different and becoming irreconcilable platforms. You can see the fracturing already this election cycle.
Repositioning, sure. Majority? I think that'll take quite some time while they figure out what they want to be.
> Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of
this.
Err maybe in comparison to Ted Cruz, but it's not really a contest for the general even according to Fox News:
Wait and watch. There will be a thing called the GOP but it will not look like our current conception of the GOP. The conservative hand-wringing over Trump's complete indifference to the traditional platform is the first step in transformation.
We'll always have a two party system in the US. What the parties stand for changes drastically over time.
The thing I think most people don't get is that politics is never resolved. There will always be a fight. And in a two party system, no one party will stay in power more than a couple of election cycles. There's a homeostatic mechanism at play.
Yeah, it would have been interesting to see how many parties were on hard left too - not that I'm equating the two things morally.
In the UK there is a lot of rhetoric that Europe is moving toward the far right rapidly. But if you look at the big players, in Germany, Italy and Spain the far right wing plays almost no role, in France it does but that has not changed appreciably over time.
Meanwhile, in the UK I think story of UKIP is complicated because, while it is clearly appealing to far right themes, essentially it's a single issue party about EU membership.
What UKIP would do if the UK decides to remain (or leave?) the EU is quite hard to foresee.
I'd suggest the picture is messy enough that you can read whatever your pet theory is into it. If there is another deep recession then anything could happen, but you can always say that.
Frankly it may be better for UKIP if the UK stays in the EU. The Brexit people are going to be angry, and will still want to vote for Euro sceptic parties. You could also see the Conservatives adopt a more Euro sceptic posture in trying to placate their more vocal Brexit supporters.
not the best job in the history of data collection. Lot of percentages are incorrect, categorization for many parties debatable (if not plain wrong)...
How far do we have to go before abolishing the 'right/left' distinction? It's very complicated nowadays. The US by european standards only has "conservative right" and progressive right". The far right in europe is actually national socialism. The far left (e.g. syriza in greece, maybe podemos in the future) caves in to market forces because it needs the market more than they need them. Centre-right germany is socialist according to americans. Communist china is way more capitalist than socialist sweden.
Since most countries have become two-party systems, what does right/left dictate? social progress vs traditionalism? centralization vs the opposite? equal opportunity vs equal outcome? It sure as hell is not about the economic policies anymore.
Originally it was about who supported the monarchy in France, and who didn't in the constitutional assembly and first legislative assemblies after the French revolution.
The constitutional monarchists and aristocrats sat on the right. Those opposing the monarchy sat on the left.
Through the 19th century, the groups classifying themselves as left grew to encompass (going left to right) anarchists, left-libertarians (right-libertarianism wasn't founded until about a century later), communists and other revolutionary socialists, social democrats and classical liberals (in modern day Europe classical liberals sometimes are considered centre-right).
On the right, the 19th century saw the collapse of support for absolutist monarchies and feudal systems, followed by the start of a splits along religious lines (many European countries have "Christan democrats" competing against usually mostly Christian but not religiously aligned conservatives) and between rural and urban forms of conservatism (e.g. special interest parties targeting farmers or rural populations are common many places), and eventually the rise of right-wing libertarianism and populism.
State involvement or not is a red herring - e.g. a lot of the splits on the left have been about level of state involvement, ranging from wanting to destroy the state completely to wanting a strong state. Similarly on the right since the rise of right-wing libertarianism from the 50's-60's onwards.
Basically you can't make sense of this on a single axis.
The "moving to the right" analysis is wrong both in Europa and in the US where claims of Fascism seems to be the primary analysis of Trump.
What we are seeing is an increasing number of people seeing no fundamental benefit of globalization or technology who are simply using their democratic voice to say "hey what about us?"
These are voters who have been completely ignored by the politicians both in the US and in Europe who have been more busy with pushing technology, globalization, outsourcing and insourcing cheap labour.
To confuse this with what we normally consider right-wing is not only getting the analysis wrong but also show why Trump so repeatedly have been underestimated.
In Europe the "right wing" parties have repeatedly been doing better than any poll predicted I expect the same thing will happen in the US with Trump.
They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
Here in the Netherlands people grow tired of the ever growing lust for EU power and the ever increasing amount of EU laws and rules. When we do get a chance to speak out like in the recent referendum about associating with the Ukraine, people's "No" vote is just ignored (like the vote about the EU constitution was ignored). Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia because they impact our economy, they don't like doing business with Erdogan, they don't like TTIP. But people are ignored by the politicians in the middle. So people start voting for less traditional, more polarized right or left (here that would be Geert Wilders, very anti EU) and Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals (oh yes we have that), who are very anti TTIP, bio-industry and globalization.) It just feels like those lefties and righties are better at listening to us and the middle parties are listining to the every growing group of bureaucrats from the EU. Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU and in large corporations.
To me, the EU adds a lot of politicians who are not chosen democratically, and are thus beyond the reach of normal citizens. They are however nicely within the reach of lobbyists.
Demagogues will always find fertile ground when bashing the EU. It's been a long time since anyone has come out and defended it in a positivist way e.g. guarantor of democracy, free movement of labor, etc.
In the current British debate leading up to the referendum, major campaigners in the 'Stay In' campaign rarely defend the EU, and rather take the line that the UK should stay in the EU despite all it's problems.
What was the turnout at the referendum in the Netherlands?
How is the EU a guarantor of democracy? Our national governments are far more democratic than the EU. Free movement of labour isn't necessarily something that's good for working people, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution, as that means competition from people who are willing to work for much lower wages.
You know that goes both ways? You're also free to move to a different country where you get paid better. Now you might not want to do that, because you want your kinds to grow up in $country or some other valid reason but it's wrong to paint this as something singularly bad for the working class.
Realistically, how does the ability to move to Poland help the person working in a local car repair shop? Is that hypothetical worth the risk of getting fired in favour of a cheaper worker? What about the job prospects of his/her kids? Free movement of labour helps the owner of the repair shop, not so much the workers.
Imagine a conversation between a pro-EU politician and this car mechanic.
P: Vote for me! Free movement of labour is great.
C: Why? Then I will face competition from people who are willing to work for very low wages, and so will my kids.
P: Yea, but then you can move to France with your family!
C: Ok but I don't want to move to France. I don't speak the language. My friends and family are here. My kids go to school here. And why would wages be better in France, anyway? I'll face the same competition there.
Can you see why this may not be very convincing? On the other hand, imagine a conversation with the owner of the shop:
At this point your appealing to emotion, not reason. Even if individual car repair man is not leaving for France, if many leave to take better paying jobs in France supply is lowering in his home country, which should lead to higher prices (or lower unemployment)
I think the better counter argument is brain drain, it's certainly not advantageous for a country if many of its most skilled citizens leave. Personally, I think it's just wrong to build berries of any sort for your citizens to leave the country.
We are talking voters here. Its appealing both to emotion and logic.
There is plenty of logic of being sceptical when Danes aren't getting jobs at their normal rates because they are being underbid by eastern european workers taking work in their countries while Danes moving to eastern europe won't get the same benefit.
The major problem with the EU is that the expansion towards underdeveloped countries happened too fast.
It's one things when countries are fairly equal, but the difference between the north and the south and the east and the west is quite staggering.
This is all part of why people are skeptical. Both because it's logical to be so and because they are being emotionally afraid about their future.
Oh I'm not disagreeing with the fact that it's a hard sell. The original comment I replied to was stating opinions as fact, not arguing it's hard to convince people of it.
I think you may have missed my point - I was simply pointing out no one on the "pro" EU side has a positivist story to tell. You may not find those particular arguments convincing, and I chose them at random for arguments sake.
I think many countries joined the EU for different reasons apart from the ones I have suggested above. Despite all the austerity thrown at the Greeks, Cypriots, and other countries their willingness to stay in has remained as strong as ever - why?
And if the answer is handouts, then I'm sorry I don't think that's the whole story. Greece is now so indebted it'll take generations to solve.
The Treaty of Lisbon requires that EU member-states have an executive responsible to a directly-elected Parliament.
The EU has a directly elected Parliament.
The EU has a slightly complicated executive. There is the Council of Ministers, which proposes legislation and which appoints the Commission. The Council is made up of democratically elected politicians (notably, politicians who do not have a direct personal mandate -- appointees to upper houses, for example, are generally excluded from direct personal participation in the Council). The Commission, which generally implements legislation passed by the Council and the Parliament, is chosen by the Council of Ministers and must be approved by the Parliament.
So the Commissioners are somewhat remote from the voting, but are responsible to two sets of directly elected politicians: those forming national executives, and those directly elected to the European Parliament.
There are plans to have the equivalents of Commissioners directly elected on a pan-European basis, however this requires unanimity among the 28 member-states, and that has not yet been achieved.
There are also plans to have more proportional national-parliamentary representation in a future version of the Council. In part this is because there are broad coalitions and complex national structures in a few member-states. Already there is an expectation that ministers show that they speak for the majority of their national parliaments on key matters (e.g. in formal QMV settings). These rules were adopted by elected politicians in the 28 national governments.
The Parliament suffers from MEPs not being very close to their voters -- the electorates are larger (much larger in some proportional representation cases) and they have less direct influence over purely local and personal matters than national or regional politicians. But they still campaign, and some MEPs are better than others at being close to their electorates.
The Commission has the disadvantage of being responsible to two different bodies: the Council and the Parliament, either of which can remove them. For a variety of reasons, a huge number of MEPs represent non-governing parties strongly opposed to some of their national governments' goals. Commissioners are also often former politicians in the party "opposite" the one in power in their home nation-state. (This is an alternate source of pressure by elected politicians to make sure the Council reflects something broader than the narrow interests of the various governments of the day, to the extent that those are mainly aligned party-wise or philosophically, which is not the case on numerous issues).
Freedom of movement within the EU is something supported by the vast majority of elected politicians across Europe -- in the national parliaments, in the national governments that those parliaments directly choose or support, in the European Council (which is, again, those same national governments), and in the European Parliament (directly elected). Criticism of Freedom of Movement should not really centre on being somehow undemocratic, or at least not more undemocratic than all the member states themselves.
Returning to your question, the Treaty of the European Union requires member-states to guarantee your access to your MEP (representing you where you live within the EU) and to local elected officials (again, where you live) as well as to elected members of the national parliaments in the member-state(s) of your nationality (wherever you happen to live). This is a very active area of European law (there are some cases before the ECJ where the Commission and others are supporting nationals of member-states they do not live in with respect to their right to access to members of parliaments of those member-states) and generally taken seriously.
So the EU is a guarantor of your right to complain to several democratically elected officials about their support for free movement of labour within the EU, and to vote on that basis i...
Part of the problem is that a lot of the reasons that those who are most pro-EU have for wanting to stay are at the same time a bit icky.
E.g. the EU has for a long time acted as a better guarantor for human rights in the UK than the UK parliaments. But going out and saying people should vote to remain in the EU because it ensures EU law will overrule the elected UK governments on human rights isn't going to help win a majority to remain. It's a bad situation to be in where you have to choose between more devolved power and protection of human rights.
Similarly, free movement of labor isn't big selling point to those who aren't already convinced. Those who aren't already convinced aren't seeing this as an opportunity for them to go out and work elsewhere in Europe, but as an opportunity for people from poorer parts of Europe to come to the UK and take their jobs.
The EU should actually be more democratic, giving more direct power to the people, but have you ever wondered why it isn't? The main reason is that national governments WANT the "government" of the EU (the Commission) to be an intergovernmental entity, IE a bureaucracy they can control, and not a government that responds directly to the people of Europe.
The solution should be pretty obvious: let the people of the EU choose the commission directly with their vote.
Most, if not all, of these parties seem to make a point of scapegoating immigrants and refugees (and certain religions). In fact, that seems to be their main point. Trump is no exception. Sounds pretty far to the right to me.
At least in Poland, the nominal "right-wing" party (Law and Justice) does not scapegoat the non-Christian migrants - they just don't want them in our country, seeing how badly the attempts at integration went in many other European countries.
"does not scapegoat the non-Christian migrants - they just don't want them in our country" - OH well, in that case...
Any sorry for the sarcasm but "not wanting" and "leaving them to die" is a difference. Of course nobody wants to spend resources on refugees. But if someone prefers letting them die because integration is hard, then this is "right-wing".
Is not helping people starving or dying of Malaria in Africa/Asia right wing too? Both are some serious maladies affecting people very far from us, with whom we have nothing in common.
As for the Syrians, they'd had to cross something like 6-7 borders before they even reach Poland. It would make just such much sense to ship them to US or Canada or Argentina.
EDIT (probably a clearer way to make my point): Once the Syrians flee from the war zone to for example Turkey, their life is no longer in danger. So, them going from Turkey to Poland is not about saving lives, and cannot be posed as a moral argument.
I'm living in Berlin. We could probably met in person later today if we want. Yet, reading your comments make me realize how little we have in common. I'm pretty sure I'd find plenty of Syrian people I would feel more connected to. I don't think the geography has anything to do it, neither how many borders are in in between.
And regarding Malaria, we should help as well. But that's imply not the point. You making it about this is typical derailing we see from all the right wing populists.
Ultimately it's not about "feeling connected to" but about identity and interests - people are wired to preserve the interests of their group (nations) above others.
Multiculturalism can work ok in rich and safe bubbles (such as some areas of Berlin), but my guess is that it will break miserably when put under a true test, such as a war. As Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire, it's a scenario we need take into account.
I can't even.. That we are discussing on this platform with people all over the world and your position is that Multiculturalism can't work. Seriously?
And on a larger scale Poland move to the right is irritating a lot of Europeans. I would be worried about your EU status and how this affects you and your neighborhood.
According to studies done by Piketty, there's not a single case in the world where a backward country have opened themselves to global trade and it allowed them to rise to the first-world country status, while there are examples where it was achieved via protectionalism - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Knowing that, I think leaving the EU might do us good in the long term. (As for me personally, I tend to work remotely for US companies anyway, so in either case I won't be affected.)
As for the cultural differences, my intuition is that this forum is not that diverse - not in fundamental ways. For example, how many people here condone religious dictatorships or sex with 9 year olds? And these are the kind of people who can settle in my multicultural neighbourhood, if I start letting them into the country.
The refugees we talk about are hardly people who hang out on HN.
Multiculturalism works when there is time to adopt new cultures into your own. Sudden influx is going to create obvious conflicts when the cultures are that different.
And I say that as someone who is pro multiculturalism. But I am not ignorant to the consequences if done too fast.
Poland wants and relies on help from the EU, that includes Germany. A lot of polish people benefit from the schengen system and the ability to work abroad. However, Poland tries to opt out of a significant chunk of the shared burdens of the european union, and one of those burdens is that the european union does have an asylum policy that accepts people that are threatened in their _home_ country - not countries that they've been fleeing through. It's a legacy of the world wars and the nazi genocides which saw a lot of people incapable of fleeing because no country would accept them - and IMHO - the embodiment of one of the most important core value of the often proclaimed christian tradition: Compassion towards others in need.
Given that Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire (well, if you count the Kaliningrad enclave as sharing a border), I question the wisdom of opting out. If you're afraid of a war, I'd be more concerned about making friends than alienating them.
Nice to hear propaganda repeated word-for-word.
What shared burdens is Poland opting out (outside of refusing to go down with Merkel?)
The environment? We had one of the most rapid improvements when it comes to allround pollution.
What happened when there were talks about unified gas/oil price? Ever heard of Nord Stream?
The migrants don't even want to be here. Are we going to force them to stay? Put them behind tall fences?
The recent immigration wave in EU is not really about people who would be "left to die" if they weren't taken in.
They are generally not fleeing from immediate danger, and they select their target countries of migration based on perceived chances of making a living (by work or by social security) and having a community where one could live (usually one's own countrymen). The perception of where one can make a living is received from often fanciful messages in social media that are of course frequently quite wrong.
On the way, they pass through countries that are safe enough for them to stay. Countries that are safe for anyone to take holiday. Millions of people from EU have holiday in Turkey and Greece each year, for instance. Migrants come through these countries. They are certainly not being killed in Turkey, for instance, but they want more than that.
This doesn't mean that the migrants are bad people. They are looking for a better life, just like any of us would do. They come from many, many countries that are run badly. I can't blame them for wanting to emigrate. And the availability of Internet and improved economical resources and improved connections have made migration more feasible than ever, particularly with the European taxpayer paying the bill at the receiving end through the asylum process.
But the asylum mechanism meant for protecting persecuted individuals is largely being misused in this process. The public perception of the whole thing being a scam is strengthened by well-meaning but unwise poses and statements of politicians that later make them look ridiculous.
For example, thousands of people from Iraq came to my country last autumn. We were told that they were here because otherwise they would be killed. They complained about the food served to them and they complained that they were given too little money by the government. Now a significant portion of them has decided to go back to Iraq. Obviously, they weren't about to be killed back then, nor are they now voluntarily returning to their deaths. They just found that climate is not nice, and there are no jobs for untrained people. So the taxpayer hands out money for them to fly back.
That's what I call ineffective, and this kind of things gets voters mad. Calling these voters "right wing" or "Nazis" is not going to help. They well merely think: "I'm a reasonable person and they call me right wing; I guess the right wing is reasonable people then".
> For example, thousands of people from Iraq came to my country last autumn. ...
> They complained about the food served to them and they complained that they were given too little money by the government.
> Now a significant portion of them has decided to go back to Iraq. Obviously, they weren't about to be killed back then, nor are they now voluntarily returning to their deaths.
> They just found that climate is not nice, and there are no jobs for untrained people. So the taxpayer hands out money for them to fly back.
You have any sources for that? I'm trying to imaging someone fleeing by risking their lives and paying with all their savings and then return because they didn't like the weather. This sounds like right wing propaganda to me. And whether people consider themself as reasonable or not doesn't matter. It matters whether they are.
Just google around. This is factual. You are not a refugee if you are fleeing several countries. An economic one sure, but it's a very different thing then.
This is why there is an increasing push to add more money to surrounding areas so they can provide better help locally.
> You are not a refugee if you are fleeing several countries
It is pretty odd to me to assume that someone who has given up everything and spent all their money to leave, and thus has demonstrated a willingness to go to extremes to get away from their original situation, will cross a border and suddenly decide "hey, no point in seeing if we can get it better if we go a bit farther".
In other words, while I'm sure there are purely economic migrants who haven't suffered all that much hardship who try to take advantage of the refugee stream, it is possible to both be a genuine refugee fleeing for your life and also quite reasonably want to find the best possible place to live once you've managed to get away from the worst risk.
Not least because it is also about dealing with horribly poor information about where they might have the best chances at being allowed to stay.
If we want people to stay closer, then it needs to feel to people arriving in e.g. Turkey, like staying in refugee camps there is a reasonable choice.
A refugees who flees war only need to go to the closest safe area and they are away from the imidiate danger that make them refugees.
Those with most money are those who can afford moving the furthest away.
In most cases it's actually the men who travel all the way to ex Scandinavia and leave their wife and kids behind. They do this because they know they can get them reunited later on.
The people who really have no money are stuck in the nearest refugee camp. I certainly don't hold it against those with the means to try and make a better future for themselves far away from their homelands but that does not mean you just accept everyone.
Then you just end up like Sweden and frankly not even the Swedes are happy about that right now.
They only need to. But it makes little point for them to settle for that if they are able to get further.
The point is not that we should encourage them to go on, but that dismissing those who go on as not really refugees fail to acknowledge human nature.
If you've taken crazy risks to flee, it makes no sense to stop at the very first point where you're no longer at immediate risk of death if you e.g. believe you have a better chance to be allowed to stay in a different country, or if you believe you have better chances at a normal life if you go on. Whether or not those beliefs are right.
I did not suggest we should "just accept everyone". Just that the idea that continuing on is an indication of whether or not someone is genuinely a refugee is flawed.
Of course people do want to move on and go farther.
It's just that then they are no longer in immediate threat of death or persecution (if they ever were) and thus not covered by the refugee conventions.
To counter this, the people smugglers teach (sell) stories to be told to the authorities in receiving countries.
Again, if I were among the migrants, I might very well do the same. Move on, try to adapt, do whatever is needed to be allowed to go on. I've talked to many migrants (mostly young men or boys) and they've almost all been reasonable kids with interesting though sad stories. But they were not being threatened for their lives by the nasty Swedes behind Torneå river whence they came from.
One boy who I invited for a cup of tea after a football training, for instance, was 17. He was born in Afghanistan but moved with his family to Iran at the age of 4. He lived there for almost 10 years, as a second class person (non-citizen, no right to go to school, no proper health care, despised by the locals). Then they moved on to Turkey, then to Greece (which was not nice at all, people were kept in detention), then through Balkans to Austria where he spent a year. Then migration through Germany, Denmark, Sweden. Now he's moved on again, looking for his place in the world.
Not an easy life,but it's hard to say what we really could do to the whole of Afghan diaspora who lives like this. Welcoming everyone isn't going to work, even if I want to be friendly and reasonable to anyone I meet.
> It's just that then they are no longer in immediate threat of death or persecution (if they ever were) and thus not covered by the refugee conventions.
I think we mostly agree. Though they would still (assuming they were at one point in immediate threat of death or persecution) be covered by the refugee conventions. It's just that they have no immediate right of asylum or refugee status in countries they subsequently travel to.
This is an important distinction. Someone coming out of Syria that then goes through multiple countries, is a refugee. They don't cease to be a refugee if they travel on to, say, Germany. But the refugee treaties regulates which states are legally obliged to consider an asylum application and which may choose to just tell them "no, you have to go back and apply somewhere else".
The problem, is that these treaties does not take into account human nature, nor do they take into account the tremendous burden they impose on the immediate neighbours of countries like Syria. And so they will not work, and it is not realistic to assume they will work without huge investments in actually making it undesirable to continue on by giving people a reasonable shot at something better closer.
Btw, in US terminology, none of the people migrating to Europe are refugees. Only quota refugees are refugees there; spontaneous asylum applicants are not.
> You have any sources for that? I'm trying to imaging someone fleeing by risking their lives and paying with all their savings and then return because they didn't like the weather.
Of course it is not just the weather, or climate to be exact, but it's a fact that many of the people really had no idea of what the winter is in Northern Europe. Some people adapt, some don't. Particularly if one happened to come to the very North in the winter, the sun rises at 10 am or later and goes down at 2pm or before, and it is cold. Not at all easy to adapt. Some do, many don't.
But along with it there is the realization that unlike promised, there are no jobs that one could take, and all of the receiving population is not as friendly as in the social media clips that feature Angela Merkel or other EU leaders saying "welcome refugees". The food is really different as well, and this is difficult for some people.
So quite a number have decided to go back. These are not rejected asylum applications, these are withdrawn applications. People kiss the ground when they get back to Baghdad.
And yes, I do think it is quite a shame that so many people have spent their savings on chasing a dream that was not true. It's also a shame that people smugglers have made fortunes with this. I think they are worse than drug lords, in fact. They are individuals who shamelessly make false promises of an Eldorado and take $5000 or $1000 for a hazardous trip, and actually give advice that gets people killed.
For instance, people in rubber boats en route to Greece or Italy are advised to puncture their boat when they spot the EU sea rescue boats. This is so that they cannot be turned back (as if the rescuers would do that) and they have to be picked up immediately.
So, you bet everything on the card that the rescue boat picks you up. But this instruction does not take into account that the rescue boat may already be full. The boat won't take more than its capacity, so this greedy advice -- which makes sure no one comes right back to tell his tale -- ends up with people floating in the water without their boats. The rescue may take time, people drown or die of hypothermia.
But some people surely make a lot of money out of this. People smugglers, as well as "respectable" corporations that set up, maintain and service the shelters (paid by tax money, run by people with political connections, maintained at the minimum standards.)
- In WW2 polish were often refugees themselves. Something apparently now forgotten. Quick googling suggests that thousands of Polish people ended up in non-Christian countries like Iran (22,000) and India (10,000).
- Poland and other eastern Europe are some of the biggest Schengen beneficiaries, that a common asylum system is part of that contract is often ignored.
- In the Breit debate Poland is accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants while at home they're anti-immigrant themselves.
- Eastern Europe wants military help to defend against a possible Russian threat but ignores how countries like Greece are completely overwhelmed with this crisis.
In the end, the impression one gets is that Poland only wants European solidarity when it benefits them. As soon as it might get expensive for them, they much rather stay out of it. I look forward to the arguments, when the EU goes forwards with linking some of its subsidies to the number of refugees taken in.
In WW2, polish armed forces were an active participant fighting for the Allies, so the preservation of some of the polish civilians in Ally-controled territories was not a humanitarian help, but merely a part of the bargain.
Not sure about Poland being Schengen beneficiaries (how to even compute that)? As for Poland profitting from the EU in general, I think it's hard to compute - we are receiving large handouts in exchange for completely opening our markets to western capital - which have crushed 99% of polish businesses, which won't probably ever reach the first-world standards (i.e., due to open market policies, we probably won't ever have something like polish Intel or Toyota,). It's a great deal for western capitalists (their multinational corps get to conquer yet another market), much less so for people of either western countries (whose taxes pay for the handouts) or Poland.
I don't know about Poland accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants, do you have any sources?
The Greece is overwhelmed due to EU's total ineptness in protecting its borders combined with the stupidity (maliciousness?) of EU's leaders, (see Merkel's Willkommenskultur). I agree that we (Poland) are partially responsible for the immigration crisis, in that we didn't call for stronger border defense for EU when the alarming signals started coming (years ago) - but there are countries in EU which are either much more influential than us or much closer to the problem, and they did nothing either.
One last point - the current instability in Syria is rooted in colonial exploitation of the whole region by England and France. Unlike them, Poland never messed those people up, why should we clean up the fallout?
- Calling for tougher border controls is one thing, but what is the alternative? Let people drown in the mediterranean? Leave them in Turkey, a country which already hosts 2 million of them?
- Yes, England and France (and in more recent history the US) have a significant history in that part of the world with ramifications to current events. I think the UKs position in this matter is also complete crap, but that doesn't excuse other countries for not doing anything to help.
The primary issue of why integration attempts went badly is that there were practically none. Take the german example: In the beginning, people from turkey were accepted as Gastarbeiter with the expectation they'd return to turkey within a year or two. It took more than 20 years until the realization dawned that people that came to germany to work started building a life won't just pull up their roots again and return without a trace. That's how we ended up with the largely exclusively turkish chunks of Berlin. Similar things happened in France with the people from the old french colonies in the Maghreb: Push them off to the banlieue and best forget about them. Belgium the same - Molenbeck, afaik the Netherlands did fare no better. Not a shred of an active attempt at integration for decades. It's not a surprise this failed.
However, if you look at the demographics in europe we either need to get better at integrating people from other countries and cultures or we need to get more babies - because there are no other options (barring any sudden development on the AI/Android front). I doubt forcing women to get more children is a viable option. Banning all abortions as Poland tries to is not going to help. This problem may not be as obvious in Poland as it's in Germany, but they're already suffering from brain drain - the young and educated move away from eastern Poland. Things will only get worse - so it's not a question of want or not want. We - as in all of us europeans - will have to deal with immigrants one way or another. And we can do it as unprepared as germany was in the 60ies/70ies or we can learn from that debacle and try to improve on that.
The studies show that second generation of migrant (from Asia and Africa) women don't have that many more children than Europe's natives (contrary to what the populist anti-migrant propaganda is pushing) - in most countries the difference was on the order of 0.3 - 0.5 children per woman if I remember correctly.
Poland tries to address the fertility issue in a different way - we're letting in lots of Ukrainian migrants (currently there's 500k of them working legally in Poland, with probably another 500k working illegally). They are a much better match, as their language, culture, values and even parts of history are close to ours.
The part about no support isn't really true, at least in the Netherlands. There has been an endless stream of government programs, and billions upon billions of euros invested, which unfortunately had only a small effect. So I have little hope that the current immigration will go significantly better. I don't know if there's a magic trick, but if there is we certainly haven't yet figured out how to perform it. Even in cases that seem very successful the results aren't as good as you'd hope. The mayor of the second biggest city in the Netherlands is Moroccan, and he has said that he will not allow his daughter to marry a native dutch man. The theory that it's all about not enough support doesn't explain the fact that there are lots of successful groups of immigrants, like the Chinese. They have high employment rates and low crime rates. Therefore I don't really like the talk about the failure of multiculturalism.
Italy is exceptional in the sense that official Catholic positions are hugely influential. This pope adopted a very strong stance on refugees' rights and is fairly liberal on gay rights, hence why right-wing parties struggle to build a coherent "God, country, family" narrative.
It's incredibly funny how the most liberal worldview currently exposed by a head of state comes from a millennial theocracy.
(Edit: it should be noted, however, that on workers' rights the current Italian government is very much on the right. It's basically a centrist administration with papal influence.)
Yeah well no. All these parties have fear based platform, xenophobic agenda and authoritarian sympathies.
The real reason they are opposed to EU is not that their politicians somehow shun power, but because humanitarian values of current European legislation are in the way.
They are definitely originally built on that, but that's not why they keep adding voters. This is where most analysts go wrong and why they are surprised every time there is an election in Europe.
It's about fear of change, about being left behind. Not out of choice but out of lack benefit from technology, globalization etc.
They are not benefitting from it so why should they keep voting from it?
People dont just change positions that radically. We are talking about normal voters who used to vote left or even social liberal and conservative.
They never even consider race. They vote the parties because their lifes are affected negatively what you and i see as opportunity. If you dont understand that you dont understand why trump and right wing increases their supporters and you will continue to fight the wrong battles.
Absolutely, and these parties are posing as a solution to whatever the current problem happens to be (populism).
People looking for simplification, maybe because they are unable to understand more complex situations, tend to go for the shallow, simple-looking, party.
And people who are well educated seems to like complex systems for the sake of it. The world is literally filled with academics who loved and proposed complex systems to the detriment of the rest. It should come as no surprise that a combination of EU and the recent influx of refugees and immigrants is causing a reaction when people don't feel they get heard.
But the fact is that they ARE racists, fascists and authoritarians. Why do you think they choose Trump in US instead of Bernie who promises all the right things but is not racist or why are all far right parties in Europe full of Neo Nazis?
Not necessarily, many of them are fine with Africans, Muslims, Jews and so on (I know I'm lumping race and religion into one here). They just want them to stay in their own country, if they insist of preserving certain parts of the culture. You want a country rules by Sharia that's fine, with most of these parties, as long you don't try to do it in their country.
I mostly view it as how apartheit wanted to be viewed: Tolerance and acceptance of each others culture, but clearly separated, in this case in countries.
They also want them to "stay in their own country" if they were actually born in the same country as they are. They think people belong in Africa if their skin colour is dark. It's pure racism.
What if they want them to stay in their "home" country due to their culture? It's pretty much always the culture of immigrants that's in focus, but never their colour.
That's political correctness. Those people are able to judge what someone's "culture" is based on how they look, or where their family came from two generations back.
BTW, the people who purport those views also think being trans equals being a pedophile. So, I don't really have much respect for their views in general being that I'm trans myself. If they want me to listen to their concerns then there's some ground rules they must follow: don't play games with civil rights. If that basic rule can't be followed then I'll never listen to a Trump fan or conservative, ever. Also, if these clowns win the election I'm definitely leaving the country (probably for Canada only since I know some people up there in software development). All I can say is that my essential liberty is not negotiable no matter how much angry white suburbanites think it is. They want my ear, my taxes, and my time they better give me a good reason beyond threats of violence from their side (implicit/explicit/actualized).
You are right that lot of those people don't benefit from globalization and struggle with finding jobs etc. but:
> They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
No, they are racist. Even if you can explain their racism, it's still racism. There is always some explanation but it's still a move to the right.
If you look at the language the AfD is using for example, you realize it's intentionally close to pre-WWII Nazi propaganda.
I'm convinced that a big reason for them to keep growing is that it gets more and more acceptable to provide simplistic and right wing answers to the problems.
You are wrong then and will continue to miss the most important thing. People are loosing their belief in the future and their ability for prospering and so they are simply looking for someone who take their concerns serious. The left used to do that.
Or if you insist on you own interpretation. You should instead ask yourself why more and more people buy into that view. The answer to neither of them are racism or fascism.
They offer the solution of stopping for the influx of immigration. One of the key issues many in europe see.
Just ask the unions. They are increasingly fighting against the cheaper labour in ex. construction undermining the salaries of their own national members.
But immigration _isn't_ a key issue, it's not the cause of these peoples' troubles. They get told that, so that they can be provided with simplistic solutions.
Globalization is the problem, technology making jobs obsolete is the problem, natural limits to growth of world economy are the problem, climate change and energy crunch will be huge problems for them soon. But those are hard to explain and much harder to solve, so the idiots win.
Edit: Sorry, I read "refugees" when I saw you mention immigrants. Cheap labour from inside the EU is a real problem.
The parties are right wing and racist, they also gain votes from people who just want to be heard and think all other parties are too much like the current ones.
The anti-establishment sentiment is so bad that it also rewards whoever shouts the most outrageous things; if you call them out on it, you're obviously part of the establishment.
They are racist, and are being rewarded for racist statements (e.g. Wilders getting a crowd to shout "Fewer Moroccans! Fewer Moroccans!", or Trump's Mexican wall or keeping muslims out of the US).
I know we're on hacker news but I don't quite get how you put "technology" in these lists. The trend in Europe is very, very obviously about the immigration crisis. Which, if not racist, is at least a nationalist issue.
Globalization is a popular issue because it can also mean that national interests are overpowered by international pressure. But you'll also find resistance for that on the left (because the left never liked globalization in the first place).
But isn't this is precisely what we would normally consider right-wing? A percentage of the population that is going through tough times or big changes is looking for a leader that will improve their lives, often uniting against a common "enemy" like the jews, kurdish people, immigrants, capitalists, communists, muslims, whatever.
Right-wing extremists might have a different meaning in the US, but thats how I think it is commonly understood in Europe.
And if you vote for Hillary you are supporting her lust for war.
Thats not a fair way to talk about voting. It's a cheap attempt to try and make a blanket moral statement to render everything else others would say morally wrong.
I think you're correct that the definition of what is "left" and "right" doesn't really account for the current political climate. This is why I think the parties are due to realign, at least in the U.S.
It's also worth noting that up until now, the American right has focused on limiting the influence of the national government. In contrast, the right wing in Europe has few issues with big national governments. The extreme right in Europe might even want to reintroduce their respective monarchies. That is to say the word "right wing" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. However, Donald Trump seems more in the vein of a European right-winger, which new and surprising in U.S. politics.
You are right that people are fed up with the classic center parties. But this does not explain why the angry people in Austria vote for the far right FPÖ instead of the Green party.
The hatred for immigrants/muslims/other minorities is crucial. That's what people are voting for. If they were truly sceptic about globalisation or outsourcing of labour, they would vote green.
It's not a hatred it's a skepticism towards what it will do to their country. If anything they are national conservatives and their jobs and lives are those mostly effected by immigration.
And no green and skepticism towards globalization is only skin deep. They don't like pollution and they don't like large corporations who destroy the earth.
But thats not what the "right-wing" voters are worried about. They are worried about jobs. Jobs that the green party wants to destroy by adding taxes to the factories they work in.
So your analysis is simply wrong. Nothing in the green movement is antiglobal.
The appeal of the far right, as with the far left is that they're not the "Establishment"
The so called "centre" has moved away from trying to craft balanced policy without leaning too far one way or the other and have instead chosen simply to serve the hopes and dreams of the political and business elite. They do not represent the left, or the right. They represent a new point on the political spectrum that I see as the new aristocracy.
The racists and facists have always been there. But now that both sides of the political spectrum are rejecting the centre by backing new political movements, they've found a new voice and we can hear them again.
The realignments in the US are complicated, but the movement to the right goes way beyond just reaction to globalization and technology. At least three things have happened (imo): 1) both the public and the government have become far more politically polarized, 2) the net change from polarization has still been to the right, and 3) the government has become more openly authoritarian.
It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein[1][2] makes a really good case for (1) and (2). That has been going on for around 50 years now, since the (end of) Carter and (start of) Reagan administrations. The Democrats lost a 40-year streak of Congressional control to the Republicans in 1992, eventually evolving into the far-right obstructionist Congressional Republicans of today. In the meantime even the liberal Democrat presidents became more conservative on their overall policies (excepting a few social issues like LGBTQ issues) - Obama's healthcare reforms being similar to conservative proposals from the 1980's and Clinton famously saying that the "era of big government is over."
For (3) you have the new executive powers to wage war without Congressional approval (e.g. the AUMF under Bush and Libyan intervention under Obama), bipartisan expansion of warrantless surveillance by both parties (wiretapping under Bush and Snowden revelations under Obama), extrajudicial assassination programs, etc etc. Under the typical US understanding of the terms, this would all certainly be considered "right wing." For the public's part, you see way more widespread support and acceptance for the policies than you did during e.g. Vietnam or even WW2 (opposition to entering the war and the Lend-Lease program, etc).
There has been some occasional reversal towards the center, with e.g. Sanders, Obamacare, Occupy Wall Street, some other examples, but overall the US has been going net right since at least Jimmy Carter. I'd say the opposition to free trade, unless it really steamrolls into something bigger, is currently just another short-term reversal to the center, set against a continual bull market for the political right.
Just as one example, the FPö, which just very narrowly lost the Austrian elections, was literally founded by nazis. They explicitly promote an ethnic-nationalist Austrian identity at the expense of any notion of cosmopolitanism or post-nationalism. Their frequent talk of Heimat is not all that different from the blut und boden of earlier times.
If this isn't right-wing identity politics, I don't know what is.
So? Doesn't mean they plan a genocide or aggressive expansionist policies... Japan has been doing something similar for years, only there it's apparently not called "right-wing politics"
Lebensraum was about unifying a diaspora of German speaking people into one collective country.
These people want racially based geopolitical partitioning. The ones with a diaspora and victimhood narrative certainly advocate for an aggressive "homeland of the x people" where racist law keeps it that way.
TOOT-TOOT!
Fact-checking police: (...)Lebensraum was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany's territorial expansion into Eastern Europe(...)
As the very name says - "living space"
We're not talking about possible genocide or expansionism, I was simply responding to:
> The "moving to the right" analysis is wrong both in Europa and in the US.
As for Japan, Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party are widely regarded as nationalist/center-right/right both within Japan and without. There's nothing controversial about this characterisation.
"Right-wing identity politics" does not automatically equate to genocide or expansionism. However, historically, nationalistic states usually exhibit a widespread "if you're not one of us, then you're at best a nuisance" attitude. Mid-20th-century Germany, Japan, and Italy are just the most obvious examples.
Sure Napoleon too. And there were other parties before the parties we talk about here proposing the same things.
The point of of course is that if that is was nazist is the argument, completely ignoring the current context and reality then it's not really worthy of anything but equally retarded attempts to morally paint something s you don't have to actually make a case.
I was writing against the argument of trying to use Nazism in the argument we have here. Which someone tried his way with.
Of course it's true that the Nazis wanted something very close to the EU. It's been used by many opponents of the EU as an argument against it.
But of course it's a retarded way to argue because the current EU is not founded on nazism or nazist ideas.
My main thesis was that most political analysts are wrong in their attempt to make the increasing popularity of the right wing parties a question of racism, fascism etc.
Many of the parties originally gained their support with some of these voters but they have since then mostly developed into being simply National Conservatives.
And so their voters are not so much voting as racist but as skeptics when it comes to immigration especially from countries that are culturally far from their own.
They fear that a continued influx will destroy the culture and their nation. They just want to be left a lone so to speak.
Thats a very different sentiment than the nazis looking out for a specific race to exterminate.
There is one nagging thread remaining: the theme that ones' own culture is elevated over all others, and deserving of first-class treatment. As an American, with neighbors and friends from all over the globe making my culture a mixing pot of music, food, work ethic, church and leisure, I am always puzzled by the European idea that somehow their culture will be destroyed by letting new neighbors live in their city. A century and a half after being settled our local cities all have strong cultural identities with their ancestral pioneering families. From city-wide events, to cultural centers and musical venues, to celebrations of food traditions. I can sample all this because I live among folks from all over the world. Without threatening my own history.
Thats because Europe have a very different system for supporting immigration.
In the US it's up to you to basically take care of yourself from day one.
in the EU you benefit from the social welfaresystem from day one.
In Europe you are made a patient so to speak, in the US you are made a provider. Europe doesn't have millions of people living their under the radar participating in the economy. Instead most immigrants and refugees gets paid by the system.
Further more the US is a big big big continent. Europe isn't yet it has more people than the US.
So this is not about being afraid this is about the rate, the quantity and the cultural change.
I read somewhere that this different means that the US get the 80% most self-sufficient immigrants while EU gets the 80% least self-sufficient immigrants which make sense when you think about the very different demand the US puts on your for self-sustaining your life.
> the theme that ones' own culture is elevated over all others, and deserving of first-class treatment
Isn't this one of the themes that make Trump such a successful candidate in the USA right now? There are people who have that have that attitude in Europe and the US (and, I guess, everywhere). Unfortunately, that attitude is on the rise both here and there, AFAIK.
I get that you're not a native speaker so you're probably not doing this intentionally, but casually throwing around the word "retarded" can sound offensive and juvenile, and will certainly discourage people from engaging with your arguments in good faith.
> Of course it's true that the Nazis wanted something very close to the EU
Even that isn't remotely true. The Nazis wanted an empire based on military conquest, with the imposition of the will of the "superior Arian race" on the other "inferior races"; the territories where those inferior races lived should have been colonized by Germans (lebensraum) and the original inhabitants should have become slaves, be relocated elsewhere, or just be exterminated.
Can you tell me which part of this is close to the EU?
There is nothing in nazism that is about unifying the EU, just as there is nothing in right-wing skepticism that is about a superior race.
Thats the point. Just like the fact that the nazis did have a dream of a unified europe also politically doesn't have anything to do with the EU we see today, the fact that some right wing party was started by someone with nazi sympathy does not mean thats why people vote for them today.
I don't know how to make the argument much clearer to you.
The European Union was pretty much created to prevent Germany from starting another war (or more generally: to maintain peace in Europe).
The nazis wanted to "unify" Europe only in the sense that they wanted to annex all European nations and exert unlimited control over them. They weren't interested in creating a European identity, they merely wanted Germans to rule all of Europe (but not make Europeans Germans -- after all Europe was full of untermenschen they wanted nothing to do with).
In other words "unifying Europe" under the doctrine of Lebensraum basically meant conquering more territory for Germans to settle (and enslaving, deporting or exterminating the local population as necessary). Unless you're saying the EU wants to literally do that, the comparison is hyperbolic at best (and defamatory at worst).
I am not assuming anything. I am simply providing an argument just as silly as the one I am responding to show how useless that line of argumentation is.
It's important to realize that while Germany went throughout an extensive period of "Denazification" after WW2, Austria did much less so.
This process is probably the main reason even today Germans tend to be rather averse to warmongering and nationalism. It's only been a few years since Germans have become comfortable with publicly displaying German flags in support of German sports teams again -- the phenomenon was so strange to us Germans that it actually gathered a lot of media attention within Germany.
I'd even go so far as to say that the differemce om Denazification in the American zone compared to the Soviet zone is one of the reasons far-right parties are doing better in former East Germany than in former West Germany to this day (although the economical consequences of the fall of the German Democratic Republic and the lower population density likely play a bigger role).
While Austria was subject to Denazification its role has always been seen as more of a conspirator: it wasn't Austria that created the Third Reich, Germany annexed Austria and made them subject to the Third Reich. That Hitler himself was Austrian is treated as nothing more than an interesting factoid -- after all his rise to power started in Munich, which is in Germany (or at least Bavaria -- which btw has been politically dominated by the right-of-center Christian Social Union for decades) after all.
As a German I can't possibly say what Austrians think of their role in the Third Reich but from a German perspective it seems to boil down to "that thing Germany did and got us involved in". There certainly doesn't seem to be the same level of cultural guilt and political paranoia.
The average Trump voter in the primaries made something like $72,000. While not wealthy by any stretch, they're surviving globalization better than blacks in this country, who voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
The false narrative in the media is the one where they try to rationalize Trump's rise through the story of poor whites instead of acknowledging their complicity in normalizing his racism and fascism.
You can't just bring a bunch of muslims who have never been to the west into a liberal christian society and expect it to work out on it's own, the EU has failed miserably on this front, and people are afraid and angry. If you are a poor Eastern European with a wife and a daughter, all you see is that instead of the EU helping you out of poverty, it is brining in people from the east who will rape your wife and daughter and live off of your taxes and then kill you. After the rapes in Germany and the massacres in France, you cannot just tell people "well, shit happens".
To put this into a more rationale perspective: the left wings have failed the people, now the people are starting to turn to the other extreme.
The way I see it: you need a balance between right and left wing.
I think you're right when you say that a big sector of the population has been ignored. Normal, working families are asking 'hey what about us?', but why hasn't a corresponding political movement arisen to answer to those demands? A movement that doesn't echoes past ideologies like fascism?
And it is not correct to say that 'right wing' parties are not racist or fascists. It is, as you know, a spectrum, from the regular, peaceful working person feeling ignored, to the outright neo-fascists and xenophobes. It is a sad situation that this spectrum encompasses such different people.
Until a humanistic right wing emerges to answer peacefully to legitimate demands, present-day right wing parties will keep propagating and mirroring hate and racism.
I have a two vague ideas of what left and right represent based on US current news / politics and some very hazy memories of a more precise definition in political science class.
Perhaps someone can allude to me what this article means by right and left (not trying to be snide or anything). Is it compared to US or the more traditional academic version (or maybe I'm mistaken that there is an academic version)?
Why don't commenters skip these much-abused emotive references to '(far)right' --> '(far)left' and state what they admire or object to, regarding a group position?
For the man in the street, far-right fascism and far-left communism equate to to more or less identical levels of coercion and control.
Left/right is not the best distinction. I live in Germany and I'd characterize the trend as a move towards more authoritarian ideals. Right now it is mostly fueled by a right wing agenda (omg you should fear these evil immigrants) but the left has the same ideal (fight evil capitalism/globalisation via more state regulations).
I think it is a very worrying trend because the hunger to outsource more life to the state for more piece of mind is actually pretty widespread I'd say.
I feel like it is very easy to pass legislation that infringes on personal freedom in a tradeoff for "let the state take care of it"
Just promising less change and more of the same or "back to the good old days" is a simple but unfortunately well working political platform.
This is pretty alarming since I don't really see any counterarguments that ask for less state. We have one party that should nominally do it (FDP) but their agenda is not very liberal if you dig deeper (not very libertarian in the US sense I suppose).
Edit: The other problem is disillusion about the elites not caring about the people which often leads to protest voting for more radical parties. A party that supports some sort of direct democracy and more personal freedom (and also responsibility) is needed and probably has the potential to be somewhat disruptive. I might just be naive but I feel like there's no good non radical offer for people who feel like what they say doesn't matter at all for the established parties.
There's a big anti EU sentiment in Europe after years of financial repercussions because of the financial crisis and the refugee crisis. And the only parties who are even critical of the EU are on the far right and on the far left.
>Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia
>people's "No" vote is just ignored
>Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU
This points make me really sad. First, because right-wing parties are actively propped up by Russian govt [1]; second, because Russia openly engaged in propaganda and false flags campaign against Ukraine in EU [2]; third, because I'm Russian, an external pressure on the regime is one of the few hopes for a change, and it seems like Russian govt is strong at least in your network, so the pressure will not become stronger. Additionally, quite a few nice people will probably be infected by memes that poisoned Russian society for decades.
The way I see it, but please correct me if I'm wrong (don't hold back), Putin (and Russian politics in general) is caught between the old and new generations of Russia, during the Jeltsin era we saw that being an all out liberal, democrat, power to the people person did not land you at the top of the country at all. This is still true probably (because you need backing of the old powers) so what is currently at the top in Russia is probably what will keep Russia together. I think that with the younger generation growing up, Russia will become more and more liberal, it will take time. Yes, many things in Russia are as they were here in the 60's (gay rights etc) but here we also had the time to mature (especially regarding personal freedom) without much violence. Why does the west have to rush things, make a Woman with a mustache win the EU song festival in the Ukraine, make the world press photo a gay couple in Russia? Is such pressure really the best?
Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine. This makes Russia afraid of the ever growing NATO. Are you part of a liberal minority? I can see you want change as fast as possible but what is as fast as possible?
I apologize if I come across particularly ignorant, it's difficult to find the truth between western news and RT. whenever I read RT I can certainly see and understand the fear of the NATO.
I'm currently reading the new Tsar (about Putin) so far he seems to be loyal to the wrong people sometimes but much less corrupt than he could have been given the people around him (but I'm only half way.) Also he didn't attack Turkey after they took down that fighter, even though Turkey is doing oil business with IS.
I'm not pro-Russia or Pro-Putin, I think we are worse of if we don't try to be friends. (I think the Russians love their children too ;) )
>Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine
Wait now... You are calling EU war mongering? Remind me again who invaded Ukraine when the Ukrainian people wanted to turn towards the west. In direct violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
Putin is no weakling being manipulated by the oligarchs. He may not show off his wealth but make no mistake, he tightly controls the Russian state and oligarchs - not the other way around.
The pro EU leadership was put in place under very suspect circumstances [0] and can very well be seen as a big FU to Russia. It's all a power game, Russian economy suffers, EU economy suffers, US military-industrial complex and oil industry benefits.
I thought they just asked the people there whether they preferred to be part of Russia or part of a more EU focused new Ukraine. Then the People voted.
And did they shoot down that jet? There really does not seems to be any motive for them (the Russians) to do that. Maybe they fired on a fighter flying in the radar shadow of the commercial jet? How ethical is that? There is still a lot of vagueness around that incident and it not just from the Russians.
But ok, Putin may not be a nice man, I don't really know, somehow he is never ever in the news here. Whenever I look up stuff on the internet he comes across as quite intelligent, not like a tyrant. My point is, should we make the EU's and Russia's economy suffer? I'm betting you don't know any people in agriculture, the flower or the fruit business that lost their jobs because of this stupid boycott. I'm betting it's much worse in Russia. And who are we punishing? Putin? No, those nice people that live in Russia and work hard to make a living.
How would you feel if you lost your job because suddenly the EU would stop trade with the US because your president build a wall on the Mexican border and kicked out friendly Muslim Families? It's all a game to these people. Let's not humiliate ourselves by screaming in forums what they feed us in the media.
When goods don't cross borders, armies will. Were just getting ready for another senseless war because our leaders are dicks.
I'm really struggling not to post 50 ad-hominems right now.
Russia is somewhat headed for North Kore-like mess.
Russia is actively messing with everyone around, was involved with several wars so far, is enabling war in Ukraine, notoriously causes incidents, tries to incite unrest in Estonia and other Eastern countries.
Latest campaign "against ISIS" caused massive civilian losses, fueling the migration crisis.
This is just off the top of my head.
Friendly with Russia my ass
I suggest you also read how bad Ukraine was under Yanukovych.
Sounds like your describing the US who pay the FSA and the Kurds who fight each other. Please read "confessions of an Economic Hitmen" and, as a nice example, watch the Regime change in Venezuela closely in 3...2...1...
Oh but i hold no hope for USA, with their endless hipocrisy
(Segregation, deeply antidemocratic state [gerrymandering/clusterfuck of presidential elections/seemingly complete lack of accountability], horrific experiments on troops/civilians/prisoners [plutonium injections for example], cronyism [where US military causes deaths and the charges get dropped]
Doesn't excuse anything Russia does though.
The sooner it implodes economically the better
You're talking about people you know. People that have already been through a lot of shit over the years. Let's hope for the best, lets hope for stability and prosperity. Both are reached by free trade and free interaction with, and travel to, the rest of the world. Certainly not by boycotts, and not by demonizing an entire nation of people like you and me.
Oh, this will be A LONG answer. I will honestly try to do my best to be objective. There will be errors, too, so I apologize in advance. If you find some point unlikely or doubtful, please let me know: I can prove most of the following claims, but I may skip the link or proof in this particular comment.
As for me: I am, as you've put it, "a part of a liberal minority". However, I don't think that it should discount my take on the issue: the term "liberal" in Russia is almost nonsensical. Practically anyone who isn't pro-govt is "liberal" here, regardless of their left/right-ism.
I can see how Russia is a curiosity for westerners: it's (physically) big, it was "the second superpower" not long ago, and it "plays with big boys" now. In the same time, the inner workings of Russia are largely unknown, mostly because of lack of interest of Western media and Russian govt making their lives harder (visas, accreditation, etc.) In this situation, the only Russian narrative that is available for westerns is governmental one through RT. The larger context is missing, as evidenced by your comment. However, I honestly recommend staying away from RT. They are completely oblivious for journalistic ethics [1] [9] and don't mind constructing alternative realities, even if they don't do it as shamelessly as their Russian-speaking colleagues.
I will try to provide a bit of that context from several viewpoints.
First, we need to consider everyday lives of common Russians. No doubt they got better in the last years, but a big part of the improvement can be explained by the low base effect. When you see Moscow or Saint-Petersburg on RT or in movies, don't mistake it for the rest of Russia. Most of the Russian cities look more or less like Omsk [2], which is terrible despite having more than a million of residents. I was born in a city called Samara and it is very similar to Omsk. So yeah, when Putin says anything that implies Russia being on par with its western counterparts, remember that it's still a huge problem here to have roads that don't run off with the snow every autumn.
Another part of everyday life is salary. The median net income in Russia is around $300. This is in part because of insane taxes (47% [3]), which are mostly paid by an employer from the salary fund to hide them from the workforce (most Russians never filled their taxes and don't really know how much do they pay). There is also 18% VAT on every good you can buy and additional duties on a lot of goods (e.g. cars). For all this money paid to the government, you can get the average pension of $200 (I wasn't able to find a median pension).
Second, let's move to a bigger picture. You are right that current Russian political situation can be seen as a backlash from "shock democratization" of the 1990s. However, this view is undermined by the fact that the current President holds power for 16 consecutive years now (the thing with Medvedev is that he is a sockpuppet) and isn't going to stand down at all. Moreover, what is apparent in the last five years is that the system isn't going any better; it's going far, far worse, descending right into fascism. I don't use this word lightly and I mean fascism in the classic Mussolinian sense.
I suspect you've heard something about mass protests in Russia in 2012. However, it is less known what triggered them: the amount and straightforwardness of electoral fraud were staggering on parliament elections of 2011 and presidential elections of 2012. I was working on a polling station and ensured correct ballot counting, but then the results were rewritten right under my nose, covered by police. Additionally, all independent watchers and polling board members were forced out of district's polling station by OMON, our local variation of SWAT. Do I need to mention that it's completely illegal, it was done in the whole country, it was widely publicized in t...
Thanx for this reply! On the contrary I will not discount your take on the issue of course, it's the most valuable one here.
You paint a grim and convincing picture.
But what do you think is the best way forward? As it is here people are talking about Russia like the people are Putin, it's unbelievably stupid. The Boycotts punish the people more than the leadership and I feel they only cause an even bigger rift in the Russia/Western relation. That should not be our goal! What, in your opinion, should the west do to prevent war, enable free trade and the exchange of ideas and ideologies?
I have no idea. In the end it will all be fine, of course, but I don't think anyone know how to help countries on their way to democracy. I just find it unlikely that shaking hands with Putin will do much good. However, you are right that hostility to a general population is also bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm a bit shocked how this issue is down played in the comments here. There are good reasons for people to be frustrated and if looking at this as a system, you can influence it in the right direction by listening to people and prevent the social downwards spiral.
But there are banking bailout and massive cutbacks on social system which has direct effect on the European people. Yet nothing happened. There were some demonstrations and established parties might lost some votes but it's not comparable to the move to right we see right now.
So is the refugee crisis more dangerous to the European people's safety and prosperity? I highly doubt that. Yes, 1.2M is a big number. But that's like 1 refugee per >400 'natives'.
The reason why people are complaining and new right wing parties get established is because they are racist. And there are plenty of explanations for that, yet this is sometime that needs to be taken very seriously. And the worst thing we can do is just blaming politicians and ignoring how much suffering the new right wing causes.
personal experience, a person my wife hardly knew begged us to let him come stay in england for a short while so he could establish himself here. where he was staying in rotterdam had been overrun with migrants, he was regularly getting mugged in the street and people were banging on the doors in the middle of the night aggressively demanding money. perhaps a distinction needs to be made between ideological racism and generalisation learnt from experience.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadI just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
Yes and no. The median voter theorem suggests that voters' choices were accounted for as parties put their platforms together -- effectively, voters chose, but not when they thought they were choosing.
I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...
I think there's a problem caused by voters swinging to margins, no matter which margins they swing to: It increases the gap between the voters and their government (either because extremist voters don't like a moderate government, or because one group of extremists hate a differently-extreme government), which diminishes public confidence in the state. Much like a lack of confidence in the justice system, a lack of confidence in the state tends to have very negative consequences, as people "take matters into their own hands".
Does it help if you have someone who accurately represents you, but she is marginalised within the legislature and has no chance of ever being part of the government? If anything, I'd expect that to make you trust the government even less.
Their standpoints get watered down a lot already after the election when they need to negotiate coalitions, I'd prefer if they were further apart beforehand so it would be easier to make the choice.
Which is that all centrist parties have shifted right in their policy positions and rhetoric.
The charts only show power shifts between parties, but ignore shifts within parties. There's a lot of centrist parties that were rooted in Christian values for example, that were reasonable on e.g. refugee issues in the 20th century (which were much more significant than today, by the way), that now want to amend laws, retract long-standing treaties, create walls and border fences, disallow schooling/work/status for those refugees who do get welcomed so as to send them right back asap in god knows when Syria recovers from being a failed state, paired with hints of xenophobic rhetoric akin to a far right party. Yet they're still deemed centrist parties, and would not show it on the chart.
And that is precisely because the far right is on the rise, and the rest of the political spectrum is adjusting and compromising their stance, so as not to lose votes. That's a very clear shift to the right.
Like take the Netherlands, it shows a drop in the right-wing PVV's size since 2010 (forget for a moment that the party's currently leading in the polls). You'd think, alright no shift to the far right here at all. What it doesn't tell you is that the current biggest party (a non far right wing, right wing party) has shifted much more to the right. Like recently we saw it's 2nd in command claim refugees were visiting the Netherlands to get plastic surgery, breasts corrections, face lifts etc... I mean this guy is just a ridiculous demagogue, instilling fear into the Dutch population that Syrian refugees aren't actually running away from a gruesome war, but are merely looking to exploit our medical system to get plastic surgery, it's insane. If you'd have set this about jews during the holocaust there'd be no discussion, you'd recognised as a clear far-right fascist. And this is the biggest party's 2nd in line, straight out the playbook of a far right-wing demagogue.
Now this party isn't far-right for all intents and purposes, but it has very much shifted towards it on various policy positions and rhetoric, as have many centrist and right wing parties. And none of that shows up in the charts.
1. what percentage of the population turns out to vote in Austria?
2. what level of education is most common in Austria?
I have a hard time believing well educated people turn out in droves to vote for the hard right - I mean sure, there is always a percentage and many fiscally conservative people come from money so they tend to be educated, but as I understand it, that's not what they were voting for in Austria, they were basically voting for social conservatism which is anti-immigration, etc.
Then again that percentage is pretty much what the US faces in every Red vs Blue presidential election in the past half-century.
2. The ORF did a survey, where it turned out, that 76% of people who have an education of a-level or higher voted for the left-wing candiate. Only 38% of the people with education less than a-level voted for the left-wing candiate. [2]
[1] http://wahl16.bmi.gv.at/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/ZeitimBild/photos/a.381568636877.16...
surprisingly almost the same as the last USA presidential election (numbers are far lower for other kinds of votes)
In the US, middle-class and low-income are NOTORIOUS for voting against themselves, election after election after election, putting right-wing policy in place that basically crushes them slowly. Kansas is a textbook study of the final outcome of such behavior.
I call it "f\\k your neighbor voting" because people don't see it as voting against themselves at all but rather they hate their neighbors so much they think these policies will make others suffer and that makes them satisfied.
They do not fare very well though, right? the problem with southern europe countries is corruption i believe. Dictatorships lowered the extent of corruption because they limit it to a very small part of the population. The problem is not democracy, but the lack of other checks and balances that make up a well-functioning state. Also Germany went through economic miracles under democratic governments.
Oddly i am not worried by the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties. They attract the "vote of demonstration", but i don't bevieve the general public really wants to go through the 1930s again.
The pendulum swings back and forth and this move shouldn't be surprising to anyone who reads history. People who believe in a Fukuyama-style 'end of history' scenario are shocked that nationalism is bubbling up again, but it is a natural correction. Local governance, culture and economy have a de facto legitimacy among people that de jure unions never will.
The Left's challenge is to acknowledge this and help create a framework for a peaceful world of disparate cultures and loose alliances.
It's a kind of fundamental attribution error [1]. People are very quick to blame others for their personal characteristics ie. lazy foreigners (personal), no good scroungers of welfare (personal), instead of the situational context of recession/war/etc. Whereas when it comes to talking about themselves, they're hard working people who just can't get a break (situational), the recession is at fault (situational), no education because my teachers were bad and the school was crap (situational), the foreigners took our jobs (situational)...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It's also globalism. It took jobs abroad and fucked up the working class royally -- and it didn't do much for the middle class either, which is also shrinking. The idea of a totally open market is bad if you also want to secure what you have here and now. Of course it makes big bucks for the rich doing the "opening" part (and keeping the market rigged in 100 other ways), so economists, one of the most whored out "scientific" professions, always sitting next to those in power as advisors, will just blab about how beneficial it is.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...
In my grandfathers era, a working man would have two sets of clothes, one for work and one for sunday best. Nowadays, even the poorest in a western society have a plethora of clothing. That is down to cheap chinese labour.
You can't get round it; if you raise tariffs, you end up with expensive chinese clothes. If you then build your own factories and bring it back onshore, you end up with expensive western-made clothes. The people may have good old-fashioned industrial jobs, but they can no longer afford to live. And that's before you even get into retaliatory tarriffs, where our high-price items suddenly lose half their export market. How much of Apple's revenue growth over the last few years has been from iPhone sales in China?
Yes, and my response was precisely about that assumption, which is really a different issue than economic policies like tariffs for China. This doesn't just apply to the reaction to Trump, but also to the reaction to the (supposed) rise of the right in Europe, the main topic. The assumption that these people are voting like that because they're stupid and racist is going to kill the left.
I know and have debated many people on differing sides of the UK/EU referendum here in England. None of them I consider to be stupid or racist. But they are blaming Europe for all of Britain's woes instead of looking inward. The EU is a net benefit, but just last week we've had otherwise intelligent people scaremongering about Turkey joining the EU and hundreds of thousands of Turkish people swarming the border. It's a crass and absurd lie, and it's downright manipulative.
I never claimed any kind of "psychological pathology" either. That would imply mental illness which is not correct at all. I mentioned a very common human trait which we're almost all guilty of at some point or other.
You seem to enjoy putting a lot of words in my mouth that I never said. I think I'll end this here rather than waste my time attempting debate.
Some places will choose to allow bottles of olive oil on table. Others will will consider it unhygienic ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10076201... ).
The problem comes from trying to merge all cultures instead of considering that there can be different cultures for different places. That would be a better multiculturalism than what we currently call multiculturalism.
I'm just so fed up with dog-whistle politics, of which anti-globalisation is one. ie. You mentioned Trump in the first sentence and then talked about globalisation being the problem, which is usually just a dog-whistle politics talking point for blaming foreigners for everything.
Likewise with multi-culturalism. Usually when people bring that up in a debate, it's followed by some sort of "We must pull up the drawbridge" kind of xenophobia.
I absolutely agree that there are some incompatible cultures out there. The middle east refugee crisis is highlighting quite a few of them. We should absolutely do more to integrate people into our culture when they arrive on our shores. But the solution isn't to say, "your culture, in your place", because as with the refugee crisis, they don't always stay in their place.
The solution is to get tougher on regimes and people that still think these barbaric practices are acceptable.
Ideally we could have a debate about whether it is acceptable for small groups of people to create and enforce local cultures provided people can make choices about whether to participate in those cultures or not. I don't think we are mature enough to do that yet.
As to your first point, calling out dog whistles may be extreme, but it's only a response to the extreme absolutism of public figures calling for "No muslims allowed. No Mexicans allowed. No Chinese goods. Build a wall, etc.".
They could propose sensible options like cultural integration courses. Limited immigration from acceptably similar countries. Maybe even remember the foundational concept of freedom of religion... But while they're still pandering to the extremes, I'll still call it dog whistling.
What the anti-immigration people are actually complaining? Loss of security. Not now, but possibly in the future. Not to themselves, but their families and social groups.
Now if we look at IPCC raports about global warming and speculate what might happen to populations? Probably mass migration. When has that ever went down smoothly? Pretty valid concerns if you ask me. It's just that the timescales are off by few decades. And also some of the most hideous acts in history we're made "to pre-emptively stop X", so they don't really get my support.
Take the climate change induced migration example; having millions of starving desperate people on the other side of a wall (literal or metaphorical), is not going to be a pretty situation. It's the classic philosophy problem: If your child is starving to death, would you steal a loaf of bread? Or would you watch them die?
By building walls, you're forcing that decision on millions of refugees. Would you blame anyone for their actions in such a situation? By pushing people away we're only kicking the can down the road, it will only ever get worse. Whereas if we show compassion and show them how great our society is, maybe they'll realise that it's our way of life that gives us these good things. It's hard to call someone the devil when they're being nice to you. When was the last time we were nice to anyone in the middle east outside Israel?
There is 2000km between Germany and Syria. People in Syria are different group than desendants of Syrians in Germany. German govermnent is different than most individual native germans. Nobody has to abide by any rules or agreements, it just happens that currently some rules make sense for large majority. For now. Someone being nice to someone else doesn't exactly guarantee anything to anybody else.
I think the walls are completely meaningless in every sense. They don't make anybody terrorist, refugee or safe.
Compassion might just as well show them that we are foolish. Violence might just show them that we have loot to protect. It's hard to call someone devil when they are nice to you, but it's still relatively easy to be asshole yourself.
I advocate pretty much just two things. Dropping less bombs to middle east and cutting social security form refugees. That should fight the root causes of current immigration in short/medium term.
We've had plenty of situations in the past where significant migration has occurred, Indians to Britain, Turkish to Germany, Irish/Italians/etc. to America. But they've all managed to eventually integrate well because no-one gave up on them.
The major difference as I see it today is that it's a question of quantity. How do you successfully integrate a million Syrians?
Old fashioned slow integration (watch and wait) worked because people for the large part, genuinely wanted to be in their new country. With the refugees that's not necessarily the case.
Europe is bunch of nation states. Which means that language and race/ethnicity are founding parameters of the most fundamental and powerfull social construct on the continent. If you get 1% of immigrants, they are just guests. But 20% would be very problematic to the national identity, because they don't fit in to the matrix of ethnicity and language. But you can't treat them as non significant "other" anymore because they are everywhere all the time.
So it's also a speed/integration problem. Most Brits don't mind "Normans" anymore. Many Estonians have beef with the very significant Russian minority that migrated after WWII.
Of course current immigration is not anykind of actual problem. It's just that people are afraid of escalation and politicians seem incapable of actually doing anything.
That said, there's still a lot of folks, like myself who blame one sided dubious trade agreements(with job programs that didn't target the areas of the country hit hardest. The federal money was dolled out to all states? "We will let you pass NAFTA, but you must retain, or pass on money to social programs, or retrain workers?" We have over 400 retaining programs. There's no real oversize. And what are we retracing people to do? Coding--come on. Coding takes on a certain personality type, and intelligence.
I've never been ok with building products in the lowest wage/regulation countries.
I've never been ok with lobby groups dictating what government officials would do. Dictating bills that politicians don't read.
I'm not fond of countries that dump dump product on our shores, just to decimate industries. Ex. Steel.
I find it crazy that foreigners can pick up the phone and by my nextdoor neighbor's house, and leave it empty.
I don't like currency manipulation.
As to the foreigners taking our jobs. I don't know. I know chit jobs are truely chit jobs now. I remember guys in the 79-80's who got out of serving a correctional term. A lot would start up gardening service, including tree trimming/removal, and slowly get an an apartment, and then a house. Those days are over. I remember guys opening up independent automotive shops, those days are over. My point is there use to be jobs that felons could start up. I can't think of a sigle one, that hasen't been completely taking over by foreigners. There use to be so many chit jobs employers would make exceptions and hire a felon. Again those jobs are practically gone.
I do blame an immigration policy that lets people break the law. I don't care about foreign illegal workers. I care about the corporations/individuals who don't get prosecuted for hiring them.
I blame this free Fed money, that guys like me have no access to. I understood the no interest rate policy of the FED after 2008; I don't understand it now. Poor poeople put there savings in banks, and rely on healthy 5 percent interest rates. We put our money on cd's.
I'm not blaming conservatives, or liberals. If I was president, I would get rid of 50 percent of government regulation on day one. I would keep an eye on certain industries though, like the Pharmaceutical, and any industry that hurts the enviorment.
I sound like a Trump fan? No--I'm not. I don't trust the man. I belive the Health Care Act is too important in principle to just get rid of. I don't trust he will appoint the right judges. I just don't trust him.
So, yes I agree that people lash out at what's conveinient, or a seemly easy target--the Attribution error?
I do think that poor people, people with no support(family, or didn't network like a cheerleader, or otherwise.) have some legitimate gripes. I don't think these grips are just psychological projection.
(I look at our GDP and cringe. I look at our foreign exchange rate, and I believe it was -15 percent? That's, I believe the lowest it's been since WW2?)
I do wish I moved to France once I got out of college. I had a chance, and didn't go. I just like the way they think. I like what they seem to value.
That was probably very rightist of me, but I'm currently very frustrated at the level of the debate here in Europe. Even legitimate concerns (on both sides) are responded to (by both sides) with polarizing s*.
Edit: And the media fuels the fire. For clicks.
The left/right distinction doesn't work very well there. Social democrats are often "big state", while there are several socialist ideologies that want either no state or extremely minimalist states (e.g libertarianism was originally a far left ideology - right wing libertarianism is a recent phenomenon).
My neighbours are a good example. I live in the UK. My ex is black African, and I'm Norwegian. Our neighbours are far right.
Yet they've always been nice to us. If politics ever comes out, one of the first things that gets said is "but not you". They have black and asian friends, despite supporting a party that wants to deport all non-anglo-saxons. It's always about the scary "others" that they worry are stealing their jobs ("but not you") until they get to know they. People who meet them quickly recognise that, hence why they have friends who come to their house who you'd think might have wanted nothing to do with them.
It's not about race, or culture, or religion per se. It's that they're afraid of how change will affect them.
In the UK, we see this clearly reflected in voting patterns too: The racist and/or anti-immigration candidates do best in the areas with the lowest or very highest amount of immigration: The areas where this is an abstract fear and most people have no friends who aren't white-British, and the usually deprived areas where there's a core of poor white people feeling under siege.
The best way to counter these attitudes, it seems, is moderate levels of immigrants spread out more. Of course that would take a lot of investment in redistributing social housing and building more affordable housing in wealthier areas - ultimately this is a socio-economic problem first and foremost.
I'm assuming you and your ex weren't that different and you weren't part of enough difference in the neighborhood for rightists to vote with their feet. But there are thresholds and they have nothing to do with fear.
Cultural factors rarely if ever.
I'm sure there are people for whom cultural factors also play in, but personally I've yet to meet any face to face.
The far-right in the UK is UKIP and a bunch of Conservatives who are basically UKIP, but don't want to risk losing their seat by jumping ship.
What matters here is where parties and politicians lie compared to the historical norms of their country, and Cameron is far closer to that then, say, Thatcher.
For Slovakia KDH - Christian Democrats, SMK (later Party of Hungarian Community) and SDKU are all considered right-wing parties.
However, the Hungarian Fidesz is definitely a right-wing party, but not an extreme right.
Exactly. It would make more sense if they used red for the left (due to their Bolshevik legacy).
If you want really weird, consider Denmark where there is a right wing party called "Venstre" (meaning "the left") :)
The name first started looking weird when the Labour Party (then revolutionary socialists, now social democrats) was formed well to their left, followed by further splits up until todays situation where there are - depending on how you place two of the more centrist parties - between four and six parties to the left of Venstre in Norway, counting parties that have or have had a member of parliament at some point. I don't know the history of the Danish party names, but I'm expecting it is a similar history of very literally being the left when formed only to have the balance shift substantially to the left since.
The US colour use is different in that it was simply a matter of not taking historic use of the colours into account and arbitrarily applying it in election broadcasts, only to have it stick.
Parties like "Dansk Folkeparti" in Denmark is pretty much Social Democrats, except they are harder on immigration. Leaving out the anti-immigration part, I would say that most of these parties are still to the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US.
Claiming an inherent inferiority of a group of people or advocating for a seperate set of laws to be carved out, that's racism. For instance, police profiling or apartheid are real world, dictionary defined "racist" things.
Using offensive language or mentioning someone by they're physical description is not. It's at best rude, but it's not a "racist" act.
On the contrary, racism often comes on the backs of calm language with charts and graphs.
An excellent example would be the Sweden Democrats, where a portion of the party is very much like what you describe, somewhat social democrat. While their youth organisation recently had a hard split due to its leader ship being essentially neo-fascist, which proved to be anathema for the main party.
The USSR was conservative socially and nationalistic.
Those are by no means a sign of being "right wing".
I'm not sure if Orwell actually used the term for the Stalinist Communist Party but he definitely had a problem with their anti-revolutionary stance in, for example, the Spanish Civil War.
I think you've rather reinforced this point.
A common 'improvement' is to have a two-axis system: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
But even this is problematic. In some cases it's purely a historical accident that certain views have been bundled together. There's no innate coherent ideology at work - despite attempts to construct one.
Social conservative is questionable too. The churches were burnt down and the old elites massacred. At the earliest period abolishment of family was seriously discussed (per the tenets of the Manifesto). The shakedowns arguably settled only after 1960s.
It sure was. It tried to play down internal factions of course, but it used to the full such terms as Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ "Great Patriotic War" or РОДИНА "Rodina", and if you look at the propaganda posters, they look remarkably similar to those of the Nazis.
http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/24934238.html
Soviet leadership destroyed churches as the church was a competing power base. But otherwise the Stalinist system was in many ways socially conservative. Look at its attitudes towards homosexualism, or ethos of work morale.
Great Patriotic War and other reversals of Tzarist times (rank system in the army, the concept of motherland etc) did not appear until months into the conflict. Before 1940s you could be hard pressed to find even a mention of "Soviet state", it wasn't really on conceptual radar. After WW2 there were no celebrations of GPW. Not until 1970s when Brezhnev had to create lore for himself: V day wasn't even a holiday.
Propaganda posters had more to do that both were totalitarian, socialist regimes, so there's little wonder.
When my father had his 3 year tour to Afghanistan it was called "serving the internationalist duty". In my pretty average school education there was definite accent on nationalism as an awful thing. So I respectfully disagree.
The USSR was the opposite of conservative - they were extremely progressive. In the attempt to make a new man, they tried to crush all conservative values such as religion, family (with children encouraged to denuonce their parents) or sexual restraint (free love, contraception and abortion were allowed in USSR decades before the West's sexual revolution).
As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
That was also in the revolution's early 1-2 decades.
The USSR turned much more conservative in the 30s and onwards -- including in surprising fields like science. Even arts, which were playing with new forms early one, were afterwards heavily regulated and directed to be towards more classical and petit-bourgeois aesthetic ideals (heroic/lyrical music as opposed to experiments like Stravinsky etc, same for painting etc).
Same for other areas of life -- e.g. homosexuality was soon again an issue, abortion was made illegal again in 1936 (and legal again, but much less touted in the mid-fifties), etc. And of course social norms were encouraged to be conservative and held back, with extra emphasis on hard work, the duty of the citizen, etc. (e.g. Stakhanovites). Most early progressive or anti-family laws were again repealed in the thirties and onwards.
Of course such a regime change also brought some new social conventions and broke some old, like the break with religion.
>As for it being nationalistic - the USSR was itself a conglomerate of 15 nation states, where any nationalistic claims about for example freedom for Ukraine or Georgia were obviously not welcome.
The nationalism was for "mother USSR", which was not much different from the great Russia (before and after). Hence the strained relationships with Ukraine or Georgia (still nationalistic under that context).
The establishment in both Italy and Germany originally built alliances with these movements only because they were seen as "better than the reds", because of their nationalism and belief in strong hierarchies (whereas socialists and communists were internationalist and against hierarchies back then). They didn't necessarily like a lot of their social programs.
Leaving out the anti-Jewish thing, Hitler and Mussolini were very much on the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US (today as well as yesterday).
Its historically interesting though that the capitalists were generally supporters of the nazi party, even before the times of slave labour and war time profits. I guess social darwinism was a good match for the capitalist competition mindset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_e...
To summarize: they were initially just called the "German Worker's Party" and had a strong basis in the middle-class. They weren't interested in socialism (i.e. social ownership of capital) but merely in profit sharing (i.e. paying workers better). Their leaders were nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist pretty much from day one -- which is also why they were categorically opposed to communists and other (anti-national or non-nationalist) socialists.
The entire party can be explained as a radical reaction to the fallout from WW1 in Germany: economy in ruins, political lack of power, basically Euro-crisis Greece but significantly worse because everybody hated them and there wasn't an international union trying to fix them.
The reason capitalists liked the NSDAP was that there literally wasn't much capitalisting to do in Germany without first re-asserting Germany's political (and military) power in Europe -- and that's one of the main things the NSDAP tried to do. Though I'm sure Jewish or non-anti-Semitic (remember: before WW2 anti-Semitism was socially acceptable) capitalists weren't too thrilled about the rampant anti-Semitism.
On the very far left everything is totally fair and each person does what they can to help everyone else (in theory). Then you have the more reasonable left, where welfare systems help the less fortunate, because it's the moral thing to do.
As you move toward the right you start to see people wanted to keep what they have for themselves, hence low taxes, and no spending state money no helping others (e.g. Obamacare). Finally in the very far right you have people who don't even want to share their country. They were born there thank you very much and fuck you if you weren't.
Just as the VVD, a right-wing liberal party is marked as center-left center-right. But if those are marked as center. Same with left wing parties, which show up as 'other'
Overlay it with a map of Austria and the rural areas voted very strongly for the right-wing candidate while the larger cities (Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz,...) voted for the green candidate. I'd really like to find the chance to overlay the last elections results for UKIP, Sweden Democrats, Trump, AfD etc. with population density maps.
In the US there has been a flight toward cities, increasing the numbers of people with a cosmopolitan perspective. These demographics are worth watching.
Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of reasons.
These populations aren't what you'd consider traditionally "cosmopolitan" or "sophisticated" by any means. I mean, a voting base of cosmopolitans wouldn't really be enough to win an election anyway.
There's a reason the GOP is trying really, really hard to win over more Hispanic voters lately.
If you're arguing that minority populations are voting for the Left in spite of the Left being aligned with the elite, that's a fairly gross mischaracterization.
There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner. Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.
I'd argue mostly the opposite. There's a shift underway, but I don't think it'll be to the GOP's benefit. Fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are slowly starting to realize they're very different and becoming irreconcilable platforms. You can see the fracturing already this election cycle.
Repositioning, sure. Majority? I think that'll take quite some time while they figure out what they want to be.
> Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.
Err maybe in comparison to Ted Cruz, but it's not really a contest for the general even according to Fox News:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/05/20/latinos...
We'll always have a two party system in the US. What the parties stand for changes drastically over time.
The thing I think most people don't get is that politics is never resolved. There will always be a fight. And in a two party system, no one party will stay in power more than a couple of election cycles. There's a homeostatic mechanism at play.
In the UK there is a lot of rhetoric that Europe is moving toward the far right rapidly. But if you look at the big players, in Germany, Italy and Spain the far right wing plays almost no role, in France it does but that has not changed appreciably over time.
Meanwhile, in the UK I think story of UKIP is complicated because, while it is clearly appealing to far right themes, essentially it's a single issue party about EU membership.
What UKIP would do if the UK decides to remain (or leave?) the EU is quite hard to foresee.
I'd suggest the picture is messy enough that you can read whatever your pet theory is into it. If there is another deep recession then anything could happen, but you can always say that.
Since most countries have become two-party systems, what does right/left dictate? social progress vs traditionalism? centralization vs the opposite? equal opportunity vs equal outcome? It sure as hell is not about the economic policies anymore.
The constitutional monarchists and aristocrats sat on the right. Those opposing the monarchy sat on the left.
Through the 19th century, the groups classifying themselves as left grew to encompass (going left to right) anarchists, left-libertarians (right-libertarianism wasn't founded until about a century later), communists and other revolutionary socialists, social democrats and classical liberals (in modern day Europe classical liberals sometimes are considered centre-right).
On the right, the 19th century saw the collapse of support for absolutist monarchies and feudal systems, followed by the start of a splits along religious lines (many European countries have "Christan democrats" competing against usually mostly Christian but not religiously aligned conservatives) and between rural and urban forms of conservatism (e.g. special interest parties targeting farmers or rural populations are common many places), and eventually the rise of right-wing libertarianism and populism.
State involvement or not is a red herring - e.g. a lot of the splits on the left have been about level of state involvement, ranging from wanting to destroy the state completely to wanting a strong state. Similarly on the right since the rise of right-wing libertarianism from the 50's-60's onwards.
Basically you can't make sense of this on a single axis.
What we are seeing is an increasing number of people seeing no fundamental benefit of globalization or technology who are simply using their democratic voice to say "hey what about us?"
These are voters who have been completely ignored by the politicians both in the US and in Europe who have been more busy with pushing technology, globalization, outsourcing and insourcing cheap labour.
To confuse this with what we normally consider right-wing is not only getting the analysis wrong but also show why Trump so repeatedly have been underestimated.
In Europe the "right wing" parties have repeatedly been doing better than any poll predicted I expect the same thing will happen in the US with Trump.
They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
Here in the Netherlands people grow tired of the ever growing lust for EU power and the ever increasing amount of EU laws and rules. When we do get a chance to speak out like in the recent referendum about associating with the Ukraine, people's "No" vote is just ignored (like the vote about the EU constitution was ignored). Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia because they impact our economy, they don't like doing business with Erdogan, they don't like TTIP. But people are ignored by the politicians in the middle. So people start voting for less traditional, more polarized right or left (here that would be Geert Wilders, very anti EU) and Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals (oh yes we have that), who are very anti TTIP, bio-industry and globalization.) It just feels like those lefties and righties are better at listening to us and the middle parties are listining to the every growing group of bureaucrats from the EU. Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU and in large corporations.
To me, the EU adds a lot of politicians who are not chosen democratically, and are thus beyond the reach of normal citizens. They are however nicely within the reach of lobbyists.
In the current British debate leading up to the referendum, major campaigners in the 'Stay In' campaign rarely defend the EU, and rather take the line that the UK should stay in the EU despite all it's problems.
What was the turnout at the referendum in the Netherlands?
P: Vote for me! Free movement of labour is great.
C: Why? Then I will face competition from people who are willing to work for very low wages, and so will my kids.
P: Yea, but then you can move to France with your family!
C: Ok but I don't want to move to France. I don't speak the language. My friends and family are here. My kids go to school here. And why would wages be better in France, anyway? I'll face the same competition there.
Can you see why this may not be very convincing? On the other hand, imagine a conversation with the owner of the shop:
P: Vote for me! Free movement of labour is great.
O: Indeed, I'll be able to hire cheaper workers.
I think the better counter argument is brain drain, it's certainly not advantageous for a country if many of its most skilled citizens leave. Personally, I think it's just wrong to build berries of any sort for your citizens to leave the country.
There is plenty of logic of being sceptical when Danes aren't getting jobs at their normal rates because they are being underbid by eastern european workers taking work in their countries while Danes moving to eastern europe won't get the same benefit.
The major problem with the EU is that the expansion towards underdeveloped countries happened too fast.
It's one things when countries are fairly equal, but the difference between the north and the south and the east and the west is quite staggering.
This is all part of why people are skeptical. Both because it's logical to be so and because they are being emotionally afraid about their future.
I think many countries joined the EU for different reasons apart from the ones I have suggested above. Despite all the austerity thrown at the Greeks, Cypriots, and other countries their willingness to stay in has remained as strong as ever - why?
And if the answer is handouts, then I'm sorry I don't think that's the whole story. Greece is now so indebted it'll take generations to solve.
The EU has a directly elected Parliament.
The EU has a slightly complicated executive. There is the Council of Ministers, which proposes legislation and which appoints the Commission. The Council is made up of democratically elected politicians (notably, politicians who do not have a direct personal mandate -- appointees to upper houses, for example, are generally excluded from direct personal participation in the Council). The Commission, which generally implements legislation passed by the Council and the Parliament, is chosen by the Council of Ministers and must be approved by the Parliament.
So the Commissioners are somewhat remote from the voting, but are responsible to two sets of directly elected politicians: those forming national executives, and those directly elected to the European Parliament.
There are plans to have the equivalents of Commissioners directly elected on a pan-European basis, however this requires unanimity among the 28 member-states, and that has not yet been achieved.
There are also plans to have more proportional national-parliamentary representation in a future version of the Council. In part this is because there are broad coalitions and complex national structures in a few member-states. Already there is an expectation that ministers show that they speak for the majority of their national parliaments on key matters (e.g. in formal QMV settings). These rules were adopted by elected politicians in the 28 national governments.
The Parliament suffers from MEPs not being very close to their voters -- the electorates are larger (much larger in some proportional representation cases) and they have less direct influence over purely local and personal matters than national or regional politicians. But they still campaign, and some MEPs are better than others at being close to their electorates.
The Commission has the disadvantage of being responsible to two different bodies: the Council and the Parliament, either of which can remove them. For a variety of reasons, a huge number of MEPs represent non-governing parties strongly opposed to some of their national governments' goals. Commissioners are also often former politicians in the party "opposite" the one in power in their home nation-state. (This is an alternate source of pressure by elected politicians to make sure the Council reflects something broader than the narrow interests of the various governments of the day, to the extent that those are mainly aligned party-wise or philosophically, which is not the case on numerous issues).
Freedom of movement within the EU is something supported by the vast majority of elected politicians across Europe -- in the national parliaments, in the national governments that those parliaments directly choose or support, in the European Council (which is, again, those same national governments), and in the European Parliament (directly elected). Criticism of Freedom of Movement should not really centre on being somehow undemocratic, or at least not more undemocratic than all the member states themselves.
Returning to your question, the Treaty of the European Union requires member-states to guarantee your access to your MEP (representing you where you live within the EU) and to local elected officials (again, where you live) as well as to elected members of the national parliaments in the member-state(s) of your nationality (wherever you happen to live). This is a very active area of European law (there are some cases before the ECJ where the Commission and others are supporting nationals of member-states they do not live in with respect to their right to access to members of parliaments of those member-states) and generally taken seriously.
So the EU is a guarantor of your right to complain to several democratically elected officials about their support for free movement of labour within the EU, and to vote on that basis i...
E.g. the EU has for a long time acted as a better guarantor for human rights in the UK than the UK parliaments. But going out and saying people should vote to remain in the EU because it ensures EU law will overrule the elected UK governments on human rights isn't going to help win a majority to remain. It's a bad situation to be in where you have to choose between more devolved power and protection of human rights.
Similarly, free movement of labor isn't big selling point to those who aren't already convinced. Those who aren't already convinced aren't seeing this as an opportunity for them to go out and work elsewhere in Europe, but as an opportunity for people from poorer parts of Europe to come to the UK and take their jobs.
Genuinely curious, when has this come up in the recent past?
The solution should be pretty obvious: let the people of the EU choose the commission directly with their vote.
Any sorry for the sarcasm but "not wanting" and "leaving them to die" is a difference. Of course nobody wants to spend resources on refugees. But if someone prefers letting them die because integration is hard, then this is "right-wing".
As for the Syrians, they'd had to cross something like 6-7 borders before they even reach Poland. It would make just such much sense to ship them to US or Canada or Argentina.
EDIT (probably a clearer way to make my point): Once the Syrians flee from the war zone to for example Turkey, their life is no longer in danger. So, them going from Turkey to Poland is not about saving lives, and cannot be posed as a moral argument.
And regarding Malaria, we should help as well. But that's imply not the point. You making it about this is typical derailing we see from all the right wing populists.
Multiculturalism can work ok in rich and safe bubbles (such as some areas of Berlin), but my guess is that it will break miserably when put under a true test, such as a war. As Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire, it's a scenario we need take into account.
As for the cultural differences, my intuition is that this forum is not that diverse - not in fundamental ways. For example, how many people here condone religious dictatorships or sex with 9 year olds? And these are the kind of people who can settle in my multicultural neighbourhood, if I start letting them into the country.
The refugees we talk about are hardly people who hang out on HN.
Multiculturalism works when there is time to adopt new cultures into your own. Sudden influx is going to create obvious conflicts when the cultures are that different.
And I say that as someone who is pro multiculturalism. But I am not ignorant to the consequences if done too fast.
Given that Poland happens to share a border with an aggressive empire (well, if you count the Kaliningrad enclave as sharing a border), I question the wisdom of opting out. If you're afraid of a war, I'd be more concerned about making friends than alienating them.
They are generally not fleeing from immediate danger, and they select their target countries of migration based on perceived chances of making a living (by work or by social security) and having a community where one could live (usually one's own countrymen). The perception of where one can make a living is received from often fanciful messages in social media that are of course frequently quite wrong.
On the way, they pass through countries that are safe enough for them to stay. Countries that are safe for anyone to take holiday. Millions of people from EU have holiday in Turkey and Greece each year, for instance. Migrants come through these countries. They are certainly not being killed in Turkey, for instance, but they want more than that.
This doesn't mean that the migrants are bad people. They are looking for a better life, just like any of us would do. They come from many, many countries that are run badly. I can't blame them for wanting to emigrate. And the availability of Internet and improved economical resources and improved connections have made migration more feasible than ever, particularly with the European taxpayer paying the bill at the receiving end through the asylum process.
But the asylum mechanism meant for protecting persecuted individuals is largely being misused in this process. The public perception of the whole thing being a scam is strengthened by well-meaning but unwise poses and statements of politicians that later make them look ridiculous.
For example, thousands of people from Iraq came to my country last autumn. We were told that they were here because otherwise they would be killed. They complained about the food served to them and they complained that they were given too little money by the government. Now a significant portion of them has decided to go back to Iraq. Obviously, they weren't about to be killed back then, nor are they now voluntarily returning to their deaths. They just found that climate is not nice, and there are no jobs for untrained people. So the taxpayer hands out money for them to fly back.
That's what I call ineffective, and this kind of things gets voters mad. Calling these voters "right wing" or "Nazis" is not going to help. They well merely think: "I'm a reasonable person and they call me right wing; I guess the right wing is reasonable people then".
You have any sources for that? I'm trying to imaging someone fleeing by risking their lives and paying with all their savings and then return because they didn't like the weather. This sounds like right wing propaganda to me. And whether people consider themself as reasonable or not doesn't matter. It matters whether they are.
This is why there is an increasing push to add more money to surrounding areas so they can provide better help locally.
It is pretty odd to me to assume that someone who has given up everything and spent all their money to leave, and thus has demonstrated a willingness to go to extremes to get away from their original situation, will cross a border and suddenly decide "hey, no point in seeing if we can get it better if we go a bit farther".
In other words, while I'm sure there are purely economic migrants who haven't suffered all that much hardship who try to take advantage of the refugee stream, it is possible to both be a genuine refugee fleeing for your life and also quite reasonably want to find the best possible place to live once you've managed to get away from the worst risk.
Not least because it is also about dealing with horribly poor information about where they might have the best chances at being allowed to stay.
If we want people to stay closer, then it needs to feel to people arriving in e.g. Turkey, like staying in refugee camps there is a reasonable choice.
A refugees who flees war only need to go to the closest safe area and they are away from the imidiate danger that make them refugees.
Those with most money are those who can afford moving the furthest away.
In most cases it's actually the men who travel all the way to ex Scandinavia and leave their wife and kids behind. They do this because they know they can get them reunited later on.
The people who really have no money are stuck in the nearest refugee camp. I certainly don't hold it against those with the means to try and make a better future for themselves far away from their homelands but that does not mean you just accept everyone.
Then you just end up like Sweden and frankly not even the Swedes are happy about that right now.
The point is not that we should encourage them to go on, but that dismissing those who go on as not really refugees fail to acknowledge human nature.
If you've taken crazy risks to flee, it makes no sense to stop at the very first point where you're no longer at immediate risk of death if you e.g. believe you have a better chance to be allowed to stay in a different country, or if you believe you have better chances at a normal life if you go on. Whether or not those beliefs are right.
I did not suggest we should "just accept everyone". Just that the idea that continuing on is an indication of whether or not someone is genuinely a refugee is flawed.
It's just that then they are no longer in immediate threat of death or persecution (if they ever were) and thus not covered by the refugee conventions.
To counter this, the people smugglers teach (sell) stories to be told to the authorities in receiving countries.
Again, if I were among the migrants, I might very well do the same. Move on, try to adapt, do whatever is needed to be allowed to go on. I've talked to many migrants (mostly young men or boys) and they've almost all been reasonable kids with interesting though sad stories. But they were not being threatened for their lives by the nasty Swedes behind Torneå river whence they came from.
One boy who I invited for a cup of tea after a football training, for instance, was 17. He was born in Afghanistan but moved with his family to Iran at the age of 4. He lived there for almost 10 years, as a second class person (non-citizen, no right to go to school, no proper health care, despised by the locals). Then they moved on to Turkey, then to Greece (which was not nice at all, people were kept in detention), then through Balkans to Austria where he spent a year. Then migration through Germany, Denmark, Sweden. Now he's moved on again, looking for his place in the world.
Not an easy life,but it's hard to say what we really could do to the whole of Afghan diaspora who lives like this. Welcoming everyone isn't going to work, even if I want to be friendly and reasonable to anyone I meet.
I think we mostly agree. Though they would still (assuming they were at one point in immediate threat of death or persecution) be covered by the refugee conventions. It's just that they have no immediate right of asylum or refugee status in countries they subsequently travel to.
This is an important distinction. Someone coming out of Syria that then goes through multiple countries, is a refugee. They don't cease to be a refugee if they travel on to, say, Germany. But the refugee treaties regulates which states are legally obliged to consider an asylum application and which may choose to just tell them "no, you have to go back and apply somewhere else".
The problem, is that these treaties does not take into account human nature, nor do they take into account the tremendous burden they impose on the immediate neighbours of countries like Syria. And so they will not work, and it is not realistic to assume they will work without huge investments in actually making it undesirable to continue on by giving people a reasonable shot at something better closer.
Deutschlandfunk (public broadcasting): http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/rueckkehr-in-den-irak-fluechtl...
Tagesschau (public broadcasting, left-leaning): https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/rueckkehr-irak-101.html
Zeit (most widely read German weekly newspaper, centrist-left): http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2016-03/fluechtlingsk...
Explicitly no right-wing media, far from it in fact.
Of course it is not just the weather, or climate to be exact, but it's a fact that many of the people really had no idea of what the winter is in Northern Europe. Some people adapt, some don't. Particularly if one happened to come to the very North in the winter, the sun rises at 10 am or later and goes down at 2pm or before, and it is cold. Not at all easy to adapt. Some do, many don't.
But along with it there is the realization that unlike promised, there are no jobs that one could take, and all of the receiving population is not as friendly as in the social media clips that feature Angela Merkel or other EU leaders saying "welcome refugees". The food is really different as well, and this is difficult for some people.
So quite a number have decided to go back. These are not rejected asylum applications, these are withdrawn applications. People kiss the ground when they get back to Baghdad.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/finland_flies_103_former_asylum_seeker...
And yes, I do think it is quite a shame that so many people have spent their savings on chasing a dream that was not true. It's also a shame that people smugglers have made fortunes with this. I think they are worse than drug lords, in fact. They are individuals who shamelessly make false promises of an Eldorado and take $5000 or $1000 for a hazardous trip, and actually give advice that gets people killed.
For instance, people in rubber boats en route to Greece or Italy are advised to puncture their boat when they spot the EU sea rescue boats. This is so that they cannot be turned back (as if the rescuers would do that) and they have to be picked up immediately.
So, you bet everything on the card that the rescue boat picks you up. But this instruction does not take into account that the rescue boat may already be full. The boat won't take more than its capacity, so this greedy advice -- which makes sure no one comes right back to tell his tale -- ends up with people floating in the water without their boats. The rescue may take time, people drown or die of hypothermia.
But some people surely make a lot of money out of this. People smugglers, as well as "respectable" corporations that set up, maintain and service the shelters (paid by tax money, run by people with political connections, maintained at the minimum standards.)
- In WW2 polish were often refugees themselves. Something apparently now forgotten. Quick googling suggests that thousands of Polish people ended up in non-Christian countries like Iran (22,000) and India (10,000). - Poland and other eastern Europe are some of the biggest Schengen beneficiaries, that a common asylum system is part of that contract is often ignored. - In the Breit debate Poland is accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants while at home they're anti-immigrant themselves. - Eastern Europe wants military help to defend against a possible Russian threat but ignores how countries like Greece are completely overwhelmed with this crisis.
In the end, the impression one gets is that Poland only wants European solidarity when it benefits them. As soon as it might get expensive for them, they much rather stay out of it. I look forward to the arguments, when the EU goes forwards with linking some of its subsidies to the number of refugees taken in.
Not sure about Poland being Schengen beneficiaries (how to even compute that)? As for Poland profitting from the EU in general, I think it's hard to compute - we are receiving large handouts in exchange for completely opening our markets to western capital - which have crushed 99% of polish businesses, which won't probably ever reach the first-world standards (i.e., due to open market policies, we probably won't ever have something like polish Intel or Toyota,). It's a great deal for western capitalists (their multinational corps get to conquer yet another market), much less so for people of either western countries (whose taxes pay for the handouts) or Poland.
I don't know about Poland accusing the UK of scapegoating migrants, do you have any sources?
The Greece is overwhelmed due to EU's total ineptness in protecting its borders combined with the stupidity (maliciousness?) of EU's leaders, (see Merkel's Willkommenskultur). I agree that we (Poland) are partially responsible for the immigration crisis, in that we didn't call for stronger border defense for EU when the alarming signals started coming (years ago) - but there are countries in EU which are either much more influential than us or much closer to the problem, and they did nothing either.
One last point - the current instability in Syria is rooted in colonial exploitation of the whole region by England and France. Unlike them, Poland never messed those people up, why should we clean up the fallout?
- So the polish people needed favours to liberate their own homeland? That's worded a bit strong but seems like it sums up your argument.
- The schengen point was invalid, I was mixing it up with freedom of movement. My bad.
- For the scapegoating, see this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/1204...
- Calling for tougher border controls is one thing, but what is the alternative? Let people drown in the mediterranean? Leave them in Turkey, a country which already hosts 2 million of them?
- Yes, England and France (and in more recent history the US) have a significant history in that part of the world with ramifications to current events. I think the UKs position in this matter is also complete crap, but that doesn't excuse other countries for not doing anything to help.
However, if you look at the demographics in europe we either need to get better at integrating people from other countries and cultures or we need to get more babies - because there are no other options (barring any sudden development on the AI/Android front). I doubt forcing women to get more children is a viable option. Banning all abortions as Poland tries to is not going to help. This problem may not be as obvious in Poland as it's in Germany, but they're already suffering from brain drain - the young and educated move away from eastern Poland. Things will only get worse - so it's not a question of want or not want. We - as in all of us europeans - will have to deal with immigrants one way or another. And we can do it as unprepared as germany was in the 60ies/70ies or we can learn from that debacle and try to improve on that.
Poland tries to address the fertility issue in a different way - we're letting in lots of Ukrainian migrants (currently there's 500k of them working legally in Poland, with probably another 500k working illegally). They are a much better match, as their language, culture, values and even parts of history are close to ours.
It's incredibly funny how the most liberal worldview currently exposed by a head of state comes from a millennial theocracy.
(Edit: it should be noted, however, that on workers' rights the current Italian government is very much on the right. It's basically a centrist administration with papal influence.)
The real reason they are opposed to EU is not that their politicians somehow shun power, but because humanitarian values of current European legislation are in the way.
It's about fear of change, about being left behind. Not out of choice but out of lack benefit from technology, globalization etc.
They are not benefitting from it so why should they keep voting from it?
They never even consider race. They vote the parties because their lifes are affected negatively what you and i see as opportunity. If you dont understand that you dont understand why trump and right wing increases their supporters and you will continue to fight the wrong battles.
Your remark about fear of change though is quite apt.
The one that affect their personal lives. Jobs, education, cost of living, what they have compared to others.
People looking for simplification, maybe because they are unable to understand more complex situations, tend to go for the shallow, simple-looking, party.
Not necessarily, many of them are fine with Africans, Muslims, Jews and so on (I know I'm lumping race and religion into one here). They just want them to stay in their own country, if they insist of preserving certain parts of the culture. You want a country rules by Sharia that's fine, with most of these parties, as long you don't try to do it in their country.
I mostly view it as how apartheit wanted to be viewed: Tolerance and acceptance of each others culture, but clearly separated, in this case in countries.
It's really that simple. Trump give them hope, let them see themselves again as someone with the potential to be something again.
Bernie basically says. You already lost but I am going to make your suffering a little less problematic.
Trump is specifically popular with men.
Nothing groundbreaking in that.
> They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.
No, they are racist. Even if you can explain their racism, it's still racism. There is always some explanation but it's still a move to the right. If you look at the language the AfD is using for example, you realize it's intentionally close to pre-WWII Nazi propaganda.
Or if you insist on you own interpretation. You should instead ask yourself why more and more people buy into that view. The answer to neither of them are racism or fascism.
Just ask the unions. They are increasingly fighting against the cheaper labour in ex. construction undermining the salaries of their own national members.
The left have no response to that what so ever.
Globalization is the problem, technology making jobs obsolete is the problem, natural limits to growth of world economy are the problem, climate change and energy crunch will be huge problems for them soon. But those are hard to explain and much harder to solve, so the idiots win.
Edit: Sorry, I read "refugees" when I saw you mention immigrants. Cheap labour from inside the EU is a real problem.
Stop immigration.
I am sure calling someone an idiot just because they represent another view than you is under your own normal level too.
You aren't an idiot just because you are skeptic towards immigration. National Conservative is a totally fair position to take.
The left ignores them completely. So they are grasping for every straw they can.
The anti-establishment sentiment is so bad that it also rewards whoever shouts the most outrageous things; if you call them out on it, you're obviously part of the establishment.
They are racist, and are being rewarded for racist statements (e.g. Wilders getting a crowd to shout "Fewer Moroccans! Fewer Moroccans!", or Trump's Mexican wall or keeping muslims out of the US).
You are grouping a bunch of very different people into one group the very thing liberals are normally quick to react to when it's done by the right.
You are part of the very reason there even is a right wing.
But each to their own of course.
Globalization is a popular issue because it can also mean that national interests are overpowered by international pressure. But you'll also find resistance for that on the left (because the left never liked globalization in the first place).
Right-wing extremists might have a different meaning in the US, but thats how I think it is commonly understood in Europe.
Thats not a fair way to talk about voting. It's a cheap attempt to try and make a blanket moral statement to render everything else others would say morally wrong.
It's also worth noting that up until now, the American right has focused on limiting the influence of the national government. In contrast, the right wing in Europe has few issues with big national governments. The extreme right in Europe might even want to reintroduce their respective monarchies. That is to say the word "right wing" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. However, Donald Trump seems more in the vein of a European right-winger, which new and surprising in U.S. politics.
The hatred for immigrants/muslims/other minorities is crucial. That's what people are voting for. If they were truly sceptic about globalisation or outsourcing of labour, they would vote green.
And no green and skepticism towards globalization is only skin deep. They don't like pollution and they don't like large corporations who destroy the earth.
But thats not what the "right-wing" voters are worried about. They are worried about jobs. Jobs that the green party wants to destroy by adding taxes to the factories they work in.
So your analysis is simply wrong. Nothing in the green movement is antiglobal.
The so called "centre" has moved away from trying to craft balanced policy without leaning too far one way or the other and have instead chosen simply to serve the hopes and dreams of the political and business elite. They do not represent the left, or the right. They represent a new point on the political spectrum that I see as the new aristocracy.
The racists and facists have always been there. But now that both sides of the political spectrum are rejecting the centre by backing new political movements, they've found a new voice and we can hear them again.
It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein[1][2] makes a really good case for (1) and (2). That has been going on for around 50 years now, since the (end of) Carter and (start of) Reagan administrations. The Democrats lost a 40-year streak of Congressional control to the Republicans in 1992, eventually evolving into the far-right obstructionist Congressional Republicans of today. In the meantime even the liberal Democrat presidents became more conservative on their overall policies (excepting a few social issues like LGBTQ issues) - Obama's healthcare reforms being similar to conservative proposals from the 1980's and Clinton famously saying that the "era of big government is over."
For (3) you have the new executive powers to wage war without Congressional approval (e.g. the AUMF under Bush and Libyan intervention under Obama), bipartisan expansion of warrantless surveillance by both parties (wiretapping under Bush and Snowden revelations under Obama), extrajudicial assassination programs, etc etc. Under the typical US understanding of the terms, this would all certainly be considered "right wing." For the public's part, you see way more widespread support and acceptance for the policies than you did during e.g. Vietnam or even WW2 (opposition to entering the war and the Lend-Lease program, etc).
There has been some occasional reversal towards the center, with e.g. Sanders, Obamacare, Occupy Wall Street, some other examples, but overall the US has been going net right since at least Jimmy Carter. I'd say the opposition to free trade, unless it really steamrolls into something bigger, is currently just another short-term reversal to the center, set against a continual bull market for the political right.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Even-Worse-Than-Looks-Constitutional/d...
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-14/thomas-man...
If this isn't right-wing identity politics, I don't know what is.
These people want racially based geopolitical partitioning. The ones with a diaspora and victimhood narrative certainly advocate for an aggressive "homeland of the x people" where racist law keeps it that way.
My mistake! I know what I described was a Nazi policy but after reading wikipedia, Lebensraum wasn't the name of it.
Thank you for the education and correction
> The "moving to the right" analysis is wrong both in Europa and in the US.
As for Japan, Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party are widely regarded as nationalist/center-right/right both within Japan and without. There's nothing controversial about this characterisation.
The point of of course is that if that is was nazist is the argument, completely ignoring the current context and reality then it's not really worthy of anything but equally retarded attempts to morally paint something s you don't have to actually make a case.
Of course it's true that the Nazis wanted something very close to the EU. It's been used by many opponents of the EU as an argument against it.
But of course it's a retarded way to argue because the current EU is not founded on nazism or nazist ideas.
My main thesis was that most political analysts are wrong in their attempt to make the increasing popularity of the right wing parties a question of racism, fascism etc.
Many of the parties originally gained their support with some of these voters but they have since then mostly developed into being simply National Conservatives.
And so their voters are not so much voting as racist but as skeptics when it comes to immigration especially from countries that are culturally far from their own.
They fear that a continued influx will destroy the culture and their nation. They just want to be left a lone so to speak.
Thats a very different sentiment than the nazis looking out for a specific race to exterminate.
In the US it's up to you to basically take care of yourself from day one.
in the EU you benefit from the social welfaresystem from day one.
In Europe you are made a patient so to speak, in the US you are made a provider. Europe doesn't have millions of people living their under the radar participating in the economy. Instead most immigrants and refugees gets paid by the system.
Further more the US is a big big big continent. Europe isn't yet it has more people than the US.
So this is not about being afraid this is about the rate, the quantity and the cultural change.
I read somewhere that this different means that the US get the 80% most self-sufficient immigrants while EU gets the 80% least self-sufficient immigrants which make sense when you think about the very different demand the US puts on your for self-sustaining your life.
Isn't this one of the themes that make Trump such a successful candidate in the USA right now? There are people who have that have that attitude in Europe and the US (and, I guess, everywhere). Unfortunately, that attitude is on the rise both here and there, AFAIK.
In the original argument you made and which I was answering were trying to make connection between people who vote for right wing parties and nazism.
I am saying that both are retarded argument. Both the one I am responding to which you made and the one I am making.
I am only making it to show how absurd kind of argument it is that you are making.
Call it what you want.
Even that isn't remotely true. The Nazis wanted an empire based on military conquest, with the imposition of the will of the "superior Arian race" on the other "inferior races"; the territories where those inferior races lived should have been colonized by Germans (lebensraum) and the original inhabitants should have become slaves, be relocated elsewhere, or just be exterminated.
Can you tell me which part of this is close to the EU?
Thats the point. Just like the fact that the nazis did have a dream of a unified europe also politically doesn't have anything to do with the EU we see today, the fact that some right wing party was started by someone with nazi sympathy does not mean thats why people vote for them today.
I don't know how to make the argument much clearer to you.
The nazis wanted to "unify" Europe only in the sense that they wanted to annex all European nations and exert unlimited control over them. They weren't interested in creating a European identity, they merely wanted Germans to rule all of Europe (but not make Europeans Germans -- after all Europe was full of untermenschen they wanted nothing to do with).
In other words "unifying Europe" under the doctrine of Lebensraum basically meant conquering more territory for Germans to settle (and enslaving, deporting or exterminating the local population as necessary). Unless you're saying the EU wants to literally do that, the comparison is hyperbolic at best (and defamatory at worst).
Thats what I was reacting to by putting just as ridicules a claim out there.
I am not assuming anything. I am simply providing an argument just as silly as the one I am responding to show how useless that line of argumentation is.
This process is probably the main reason even today Germans tend to be rather averse to warmongering and nationalism. It's only been a few years since Germans have become comfortable with publicly displaying German flags in support of German sports teams again -- the phenomenon was so strange to us Germans that it actually gathered a lot of media attention within Germany.
I'd even go so far as to say that the differemce om Denazification in the American zone compared to the Soviet zone is one of the reasons far-right parties are doing better in former East Germany than in former West Germany to this day (although the economical consequences of the fall of the German Democratic Republic and the lower population density likely play a bigger role).
While Austria was subject to Denazification its role has always been seen as more of a conspirator: it wasn't Austria that created the Third Reich, Germany annexed Austria and made them subject to the Third Reich. That Hitler himself was Austrian is treated as nothing more than an interesting factoid -- after all his rise to power started in Munich, which is in Germany (or at least Bavaria -- which btw has been politically dominated by the right-of-center Christian Social Union for decades) after all.
As a German I can't possibly say what Austrians think of their role in the Third Reich but from a German perspective it seems to boil down to "that thing Germany did and got us involved in". There certainly doesn't seem to be the same level of cultural guilt and political paranoia.
The false narrative in the media is the one where they try to rationalize Trump's rise through the story of poor whites instead of acknowledging their complicity in normalizing his racism and fascism.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...
Congratulations on getting the "cynic of the day" award.
You can't just bring a bunch of muslims who have never been to the west into a liberal christian society and expect it to work out on it's own, the EU has failed miserably on this front, and people are afraid and angry. If you are a poor Eastern European with a wife and a daughter, all you see is that instead of the EU helping you out of poverty, it is brining in people from the east who will rape your wife and daughter and live off of your taxes and then kill you. After the rapes in Germany and the massacres in France, you cannot just tell people "well, shit happens".
To put this into a more rationale perspective: the left wings have failed the people, now the people are starting to turn to the other extreme.
The way I see it: you need a balance between right and left wing.
And it is not correct to say that 'right wing' parties are not racist or fascists. It is, as you know, a spectrum, from the regular, peaceful working person feeling ignored, to the outright neo-fascists and xenophobes. It is a sad situation that this spectrum encompasses such different people.
Until a humanistic right wing emerges to answer peacefully to legitimate demands, present-day right wing parties will keep propagating and mirroring hate and racism.
Perhaps someone can allude to me what this article means by right and left (not trying to be snide or anything). Is it compared to US or the more traditional academic version (or maybe I'm mistaken that there is an academic version)?
For the man in the street, far-right fascism and far-left communism equate to to more or less identical levels of coercion and control.
This is pretty alarming since I don't really see any counterarguments that ask for less state. We have one party that should nominally do it (FDP) but their agenda is not very liberal if you dig deeper (not very libertarian in the US sense I suppose).
Edit: The other problem is disillusion about the elites not caring about the people which often leads to protest voting for more radical parties. A party that supports some sort of direct democracy and more personal freedom (and also responsibility) is needed and probably has the potential to be somewhat disruptive. I might just be naive but I feel like there's no good non radical offer for people who feel like what they say doesn't matter at all for the established parties.
For that, we must import US's talk radio shows and let it brew for years.
Hope no right wing guy is seeing this.
The same is not happening as much in Europe, especially in countries where such fear propaganda didn't set in (like here, in Portugal)
>people's "No" vote is just ignored
>Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU
This points make me really sad. First, because right-wing parties are actively propped up by Russian govt [1]; second, because Russia openly engaged in propaganda and false flags campaign against Ukraine in EU [2]; third, because I'm Russian, an external pressure on the regime is one of the few hopes for a change, and it seems like Russian govt is strong at least in your network, so the pressure will not become stronger. Additionally, quite a few nice people will probably be infected by memes that poisoned Russian society for decades.
It's really sad.
[1]: http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and-the-...
[2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/04/03/azo...
Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine. This makes Russia afraid of the ever growing NATO. Are you part of a liberal minority? I can see you want change as fast as possible but what is as fast as possible?
I apologize if I come across particularly ignorant, it's difficult to find the truth between western news and RT. whenever I read RT I can certainly see and understand the fear of the NATO.
I'm currently reading the new Tsar (about Putin) so far he seems to be loyal to the wrong people sometimes but much less corrupt than he could have been given the people around him (but I'm only half way.) Also he didn't attack Turkey after they took down that fighter, even though Turkey is doing oil business with IS.
I'm not pro-Russia or Pro-Putin, I think we are worse of if we don't try to be friends. (I think the Russians love their children too ;) )
Wait now... You are calling EU war mongering? Remind me again who invaded Ukraine when the Ukrainian people wanted to turn towards the west. In direct violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
Putin is no weakling being manipulated by the oligarchs. He may not show off his wealth but make no mistake, he tightly controls the Russian state and oligarchs - not the other way around.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFVNRZv2eM
The Maidan movement may be suspect but pale in the comparison to Russia's actions.
And did they shoot down that jet? There really does not seems to be any motive for them (the Russians) to do that. Maybe they fired on a fighter flying in the radar shadow of the commercial jet? How ethical is that? There is still a lot of vagueness around that incident and it not just from the Russians.
But ok, Putin may not be a nice man, I don't really know, somehow he is never ever in the news here. Whenever I look up stuff on the internet he comes across as quite intelligent, not like a tyrant. My point is, should we make the EU's and Russia's economy suffer? I'm betting you don't know any people in agriculture, the flower or the fruit business that lost their jobs because of this stupid boycott. I'm betting it's much worse in Russia. And who are we punishing? Putin? No, those nice people that live in Russia and work hard to make a living.
How would you feel if you lost your job because suddenly the EU would stop trade with the US because your president build a wall on the Mexican border and kicked out friendly Muslim Families? It's all a game to these people. Let's not humiliate ourselves by screaming in forums what they feed us in the media.
When goods don't cross borders, armies will. Were just getting ready for another senseless war because our leaders are dicks.
I suggest you also read how bad Ukraine was under Yanukovych.
Doesn't excuse anything Russia does though. The sooner it implodes economically the better
You're talking about people you know. People that have already been through a lot of shit over the years. Let's hope for the best, lets hope for stability and prosperity. Both are reached by free trade and free interaction with, and travel to, the rest of the world. Certainly not by boycotts, and not by demonizing an entire nation of people like you and me.
As for me: I am, as you've put it, "a part of a liberal minority". However, I don't think that it should discount my take on the issue: the term "liberal" in Russia is almost nonsensical. Practically anyone who isn't pro-govt is "liberal" here, regardless of their left/right-ism.
I can see how Russia is a curiosity for westerners: it's (physically) big, it was "the second superpower" not long ago, and it "plays with big boys" now. In the same time, the inner workings of Russia are largely unknown, mostly because of lack of interest of Western media and Russian govt making their lives harder (visas, accreditation, etc.) In this situation, the only Russian narrative that is available for westerns is governmental one through RT. The larger context is missing, as evidenced by your comment. However, I honestly recommend staying away from RT. They are completely oblivious for journalistic ethics [1] [9] and don't mind constructing alternative realities, even if they don't do it as shamelessly as their Russian-speaking colleagues.
I will try to provide a bit of that context from several viewpoints.
First, we need to consider everyday lives of common Russians. No doubt they got better in the last years, but a big part of the improvement can be explained by the low base effect. When you see Moscow or Saint-Petersburg on RT or in movies, don't mistake it for the rest of Russia. Most of the Russian cities look more or less like Omsk [2], which is terrible despite having more than a million of residents. I was born in a city called Samara and it is very similar to Omsk. So yeah, when Putin says anything that implies Russia being on par with its western counterparts, remember that it's still a huge problem here to have roads that don't run off with the snow every autumn.
Another part of everyday life is salary. The median net income in Russia is around $300. This is in part because of insane taxes (47% [3]), which are mostly paid by an employer from the salary fund to hide them from the workforce (most Russians never filled their taxes and don't really know how much do they pay). There is also 18% VAT on every good you can buy and additional duties on a lot of goods (e.g. cars). For all this money paid to the government, you can get the average pension of $200 (I wasn't able to find a median pension).
Second, let's move to a bigger picture. You are right that current Russian political situation can be seen as a backlash from "shock democratization" of the 1990s. However, this view is undermined by the fact that the current President holds power for 16 consecutive years now (the thing with Medvedev is that he is a sockpuppet) and isn't going to stand down at all. Moreover, what is apparent in the last five years is that the system isn't going any better; it's going far, far worse, descending right into fascism. I don't use this word lightly and I mean fascism in the classic Mussolinian sense.
I suspect you've heard something about mass protests in Russia in 2012. However, it is less known what triggered them: the amount and straightforwardness of electoral fraud were staggering on parliament elections of 2011 and presidential elections of 2012. I was working on a polling station and ensured correct ballot counting, but then the results were rewritten right under my nose, covered by police. Additionally, all independent watchers and polling board members were forced out of district's polling station by OMON, our local variation of SWAT. Do I need to mention that it's completely illegal, it was done in the whole country, it was widely publicized in t...
You paint a grim and convincing picture.
But what do you think is the best way forward? As it is here people are talking about Russia like the people are Putin, it's unbelievably stupid. The Boycotts punish the people more than the leadership and I feel they only cause an even bigger rift in the Russia/Western relation. That should not be our goal! What, in your opinion, should the west do to prevent war, enable free trade and the exchange of ideas and ideologies?
I have no idea. In the end it will all be fine, of course, but I don't think anyone know how to help countries on their way to democracy. I just find it unlikely that shaking hands with Putin will do much good. However, you are right that hostility to a general population is also bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The current thread is pure politics, of course, but it's also not about the direction you're taking it in here, and internecine politics are worse.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11760362 and marked it off-topic.
>internecine politics
This wasn't my intention at all.
But there are banking bailout and massive cutbacks on social system which has direct effect on the European people. Yet nothing happened. There were some demonstrations and established parties might lost some votes but it's not comparable to the move to right we see right now.
So is the refugee crisis more dangerous to the European people's safety and prosperity? I highly doubt that. Yes, 1.2M is a big number. But that's like 1 refugee per >400 'natives'.
The reason why people are complaining and new right wing parties get established is because they are racist. And there are plenty of explanations for that, yet this is sometime that needs to be taken very seriously. And the worst thing we can do is just blaming politicians and ignoring how much suffering the new right wing causes.