I am being absolutely serious here with the Weimar Republic comparison. Because people are fucking miserable and it’s fucking terrifying.

A hundred years ago, broke people in big cities would go to fascist rallies because they were free, and because sometimes the organizers gave out free food and beer, and because people had nothing better to do.

And they stayed because hate feels good when you’re hurting and simple violent solutions appeal to the angry monkey parts of our brains.

And the fewer community connections you have - the more the economy strips your life down to work and sleep, or to job hunting and sleep, or to scrounging in the gutter to survive and sleep, and the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.

And the only difference today is that the fascist rallies are beamed directly into your home.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    It’s a general trend as far as I can tell all over the West.

    I saw the steady empoverishment already back when I lived in Britain in the 2010s and am seeing it right now living in my native Portugal.

    It is especially obvious by all the stores that closed and never opened again or did open and then closed again not long after, the more away from city centers the more common.

    The realestate bubble that really took of after the Zero Interest Policies that were chosen as “temporary” measurs to “recover” from the 2008 Crash (and were never fully undone) is eating the parts of the Economy which are not Rentierism and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands (of those who own the most assets, i.e. the Owner Class) and doing so via multiple pathways:

    • Businesses which before could survive and generate a steady trickle of income now can’t because rents (which pretty much doubled in the last decade) eat up too much of revenue to the point of wiping out all profit.
    • People are having to allocate a higher and higher fraction of their income (which has been going up below inflation, because salaries aren’t increasing as fast as living costs) to housing, have less money to spend on anything other than essentials. The steep increase in consumer debt has for a while compensated for that, but that’s reaching its limits again (just like it did pre-2008).

    The other side of the coin is visible in the rise of the Far-Right - as people feel more and more squeezed, the Owner Class funds parties which “explain” the pain as being caused by foreigners, be it “immigrants” (in the words of the farthest Far Right) or “foreign interference” (in the words of the more Neoliberal Far-Right, especially in larger countries which in my experience tend to have higher levels of nationalist delusions of grandeur) - the implicit message is always one scapegoating foreigners to dismiss the responsability of those who by far have and had for all these years the most power and hence shaped things to be as they are now: the very much local power elites and the politicians who are either themselves part of it or willingly act as their minions.

    (This is why, for example, Britain ended up with Brexit)

    This trend was already visible and the increasingly shitty state of thing was already painfully predictable a decade ago for those paying attention to Economic subjects, but naturally that’s not most people and the Owner Class very purposefully bought most of the Press (were they could, hence why places with a huge Press ownership concentration like the UK and US being even worse than most of Europe) and used it for Propaganda purposes such as spreading the above mentioned “it’s the fault of foreigners” messaging as most people increasingly hurt and got angry, so those doing the pillaging were free to do it as much as they want and kept doing it and even accelerating (as Economic growth slowed down, they went from mainly eating up the gains of Economic growth to increasingly taking away existing wealth from the rest)