What does happen in Europe is far-right parties get a platform to speak on. The big continental countries have an election process that lets everyone be heard, and the far-right get heard plenty - allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.
In the UK we don't have such elections. We have a two horse race, and token efforts given to fringe parties, and state media that are "maintaining balance" by constantly inviting candidates who haven't been elected after 8 attempts to frequently tout their bullshit (and critically without being challenged on any of it).
The far-right thrive here because they are unchecked, unquestioned, and ultimately not properly exposed. They relish in the "underdog", "cancelled", and/or "repressed" argument to win votes.
Also when our leading party receives £160k from the wives of former Russian minsiters to play tennis with the prime minister[0] you have to wonder who is really pulling the strings.
You need to look at the numbers. Far-right parties are growing everywhere in Europe... One is nearly the largest party in Sweden.
Many people do. I see this as a dangerous problem. Weimar Germany also really wanted the right to reign and it didn't turn out well. The party here was founded in part by two literal Nazis and a bunch of skinheads. I don't really care what people want when they want them to rule.
.. and on continues the shower thought.
Overall I'm worried, though. There are many hallmarks about the current political climate that have been present in the not-that-long-before any major conflict in history. I really, honestly, am worried there will be some large conflict in our lifetime.
So a society would need to be a bit intolerant to stamp out intolerance, making it overall more tolerant.
In other words, you want to prioritize tolerance over liberty.
Not even the most hardcore anarchist wants to live in a society where someone else's right to swing their fist doesn't end where their own nose begins, which is what true liberty entails, although they will vocally denounce any form of tolerance even as they implicitly accept it for themselves.
And it's worth pointing out that you don't even actually disagree with the paradox of tolerance in this regard, since the inflection point of tolerance/intolerance Popper claims should be a party refusing to recognize the rights of others or to act within legal bounds - the paradox of tolerance was written as a response to the result of German "tolerance" for Nazism at the time.
No one is actually arguing that mere civil political disagreement shouldn't be tolerated, but rather there is a recognition borne out of history that authoritarian beliefs, if not pushed against, will overwhelm the body politic in a similar way as cancer. Accepting the paradox of tolerance means recognizing that some prejudices and systems of belief are inherently harmful and that their adherents will never simply accept peaceful coexistence with others within the framework of a just and civil society.
Nazis will never play nice, and casting them as a victimized and oppressed group with legitimate grievances with whom we should empathize, and whose arguments we should consider (or reconsider, since nothing the far right has to say is actually new,) will not end well for anyone.
And to serve the forum's inevitable reflex towards whataboutism, this is not to let extreme leftism off the hook. There just happens not to be a surge in hard left ideology happening around the world at the moment, so mentioning the left in the context of this specific conversation for the sake of "balance" wouldn't be relevant.
You _need_ tolerance to accomodate liberty. Otherwise those who do not tolerate your liberty will prevent it.
Perhaps the paradox of tolerance requires a deliberate agnosticism about how people unlike us live, a turning away from information that would turn us reactionary if we only had part of it. That used to be the default in an era of slow communication, but it could be cultivated deliberately if it's what's needed.
I think you're right that we could definitely be on the eve of something about to happen, especially combining those observations with recent geopolitical updates.
That's probably not even the most pressing problem. The most pressing problem is that the rulers in a technocracy are also self-interested, and simply knowing how something works is no proof against being a bad actor. Recent history is rife with experts tilting things to their advantage, and deflecting criticisms of unfair behaviour by saying the unwashed masses simply didn't know enough about the decisions that just so happened to transfer a lot of wealth upwards doesn't inspire confidence.
If you don't respect democracy as a way to harness the wisdom of crowds, maybe you can respect it as a pressure-relief valve.
Right wing media feeds off that hopelessness and apportion blame to a convenient target, one that usually can't speak up for itself. The homeless, immigrants, benefits claimants are favourite examples.
At the same time they portray the people responsible for the decisions that lead to that hopelessness as uniquely competent by taking a tough approach on the scapegoats.
The only real way of reducing the temperature is to make those people more secure, financially and socially. You don't care if your neighbour is a Polish plumber if you're not worrying about making rent/paying bills.
Conservative parties normally won't enact the measures necessary to cool things down, since they typically benefit electorally and convincing those already in the pipeline is extremely difficult.
> allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. In Italy and France, far-right views are now solidly held by roughly a third of the electorate, year-in year-out. Party names and figureheads can change, but the message stays the same. In Germany it's a bit better, but then you have Austria and the Visegrad block, where they command relatively solid majorities.
I think if everything is laid bare - facts are proven to be facts, and lies are exposed as lies - yet the electorate _still_ vote it in, then that's fair. I'll emigrate.
But the biggest con about Brexit (as a particular example) is that _everything_ from the Leave campaign was bullshit and not one claim, pledge, or promise from the Leave "side" was ever checked, questioned, or since held to account and, in my opinion, it is _that_ which stinks the worst.
Dominic Cummings, an extreme libertarian[0], was in bed with various far-right (and also libertarian) people from the west, took office as the Special Advisor to the Prime Minister after riding the Brexit wave to success. A role that meant he had the power, without the need to be elected. He kicked everyone out that didn't agree with him, and/or had their own opinion(s). His one goal was to completely reform (read: dismantle) government. Unluckily for him, COVID came and revealed just what a cluster of dickheads he had left in government. Then he managed to get caught going on a 300 mile road trip after testing positive, including a trip to a Castle on his wife's birthday. The resulting mess of media coverage left the government with little choice but to "fire" him, but even that was a shitshow that took 6 months longer than it should have.
Now we are left with cabinet of useless, and I mean useless, puppets with no puppet master.
Side note: They (the right) also had clandestine social media campaigns. Cambridge Analytica's main purpose wasn't to identify who to send the bullshit to, it was to identify who to keep the bullshit from so that they wouldn't be challenged.
I actually think Cummings is an interesting guy and worth listening to, but I don't think he should be anywhere near the levers of power.
His ideas are kind of staid and recycled. He's smarter than Boris or most of the cabinet for sure but that isnt saying much.
Ultimately he rode a wave of mass discontent and somehow managed to fuck it up and achieve nothing while at the peak of his career when even the prime minister thought thought the sun shone out of his arse. He wasnt some genius mastermind.
The issue with this way of thinking is that you look away from countries which might have good policies. These policies could be used in the US.
FR: Front national IT: lega Nord DL: AFD ES: Vox
They're taking over Europe because neoliberals are full of shit, and the left wing has their hands tied.
Normal people have nowhere else to go.
Well, they lost of a lot of their voters... because most of the middle-seeking parties adopted their hostile foreign policy and made them irrelevant.
The problem are not the parties, the problem are the policies. Kicking immigrants out or licking them up will not improve the life of the local lower class, despite all the promises. It may improve the life of the rich, who won't have to fear bring mugged. But the reasons why immigration is happening, and why immigrants remain poor, will either continue (no one wants to do the dirty jobs) or mine too the local lower class (let's pray locals less so that they are competitive with immigrants).
Back in the 80s/90s, Sweden was known for bikini teams and ABBA. Now it's known for rape gangs. Sad!
The real problem is wage theft keeping large numbers of people poor. Whether immigrants or natives, the fact that you can work your whole life for a mega corporation and barely have money to eat is the problem.
Poor people are more likely to be victims of low-level crimes than rich people for a variety of reasons. When criminal immigrants come in, it's poor people they victimize.
It's also poor people who must compete with unskilled immigrants for jobs.
Rich people benefit from low-skilled immigration. They can isolate themselves physically from the bad immigrant neighborhoods, but also hire those immigrants to provide services for them. The immigrants will push down unskilled labor prices by the very simple laws of supply and demand. The immigrants will not compete on the labor market with the rich.
This is why the rich in the modern world have always been the ones pushing for more immigration, and the poor have always pushed against. Upper class businessmen and media people strut around like they're MLK but they really just want to pay their maid and gardener less.
Two sides of the same coin.
A large section of people are left out of benefits of improving economy. Lions share of the gains go to the Uber rich people. And politicians play immigration card to whip up their voter base.
More or less exact phenomenon played out in Bombay, India. Except that the immigrants were Indians from other states (Gujarat, Tamilnadu etc). But when the political party did come to power they did absolutely nothing to improve their voter base’s life. Bombay continues to be a shit hole, worse so, that it was and the city floods every monsoon like a clockwork.
In the South of England, maybe. In the North they barely exists, here "the enemy" continues to be South-Asian communities (which, ironically, were also heavily pro-Brexit, because of the correct calculation that British policies would then be forced to fall back on Asians for cheap immigration).
Even in the USA, the nation of immigrants, where we assimilate immigrants the best (comparatively), increased immigration has always leads to a reactionary backlash.
Being very pro-immigration, a big of Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans thesis, I have no clue how to move forward.
Yeah, well, it's not like things are much better in Europe. Far-right parties are now mainstream in most major EU countries, and their n.1 priority is exactly the same.
Signed,
a Brexit victim.