Quote:
Originally Posted by rugby
Regarding the authoritarians come to power through a combination of luck and underlying trends, one more data point on the rise of Duterte.
The establishment party in the Philippines (although that doesnt quite describe it, more a coalition of regional and family factions)... they fielded two candidates for president.
They were so closely alligned that power brokers in the party were trying to negotiate a deal right up to the last minute.
As expected, they split the vote, but either one would have won easily. Was something like 30% Duterte, 22% 20% to the other two.
That said, theres clearly underlying trends at work making fascism more likely, along with fascists reinforcing each other.
Key trends
1. significant increase in inequality. Makes the mega rich both more incentivised and better equiped/funded to lie to defend their interests and sieze political power.
2. Social media and changes in tech make it easier to lie.
3. downward pressure on labour wages (globalisation, automation, point 1) creates a class of people open to expoloitation.
4. Increased access to education helps pull the more intelligent and those better able to handle the information age (whether by nature or nurture) OUT of the labor class. Leaving them both poorly led and less well equiped to cope with the lies from 1.
5. Internationalization of capital, media etc, means that the global oligarchs from 1 (including putin) are able to peddle the lies more easily globally, as well as sieze the state in more countries.
This gives you a class of big liars (Big Lie) and a class of unhappy workers ill equiped to handle the lie, in an environment where lieing is suddenly easier.
Final note on 4. Access to education. The counter is that the US is not meritocratic when it comes to pulling yourselfnout of the labour class. Especially for minorities and women. I would argue this is EXACTLY why the strongest emerging leaders are women and minorities, as they have fewer opportunities to sell out.
I like this post and I think it gets to the heart of the rise of authoritarianism globally.
I think #4 is important, understudied and can be expanded generally. I've made this point frequently over the last ~1-2 years but the same phenomenon is happening
geopolitically/spatially, in addition to economically.
Take America. Tons of Trumpian regions (more remote suburban areas, exurban areas, rural areas) are subject to the exact same forces that the working class is: as the world evolves rapidly and education/technology strongly separately the young and educated and the older, the less mobile, the poorer, and the working class, and wealth is concentrated in cities and talented people follow it -- we see people literally
physically sorted in a myriad of ways, like the political temperament, their ability to scrutinize bull****, their ability to access reliable information quickly.
That is to say, we get a really bad feedback loop where the young, the talented, the educated, and the rich flee to cities and wealthy suburbs proximate to cities...and now we have tons of people left out in the American hinterlands left to fend for themselves, and their political playing fields and communities and towns left to hucksters and charlatans (e.g., faux religious fundamentalist types, unscrupulous businesses and investment peddlers, self-interested politicians only interested in graft).
With the talent and education drain on these places, there's no proximate talented local political leadership available to these communities to ward off any of these bad influences, and there's no meaningful democratic interactions and very limited contact with more mainstream political movements, and so we're left a polity ripe for exploitation. Lies and hucksterism are that much harder to defeat when the audience is self-selected and sorted to be the kind of people who are most at-risk, and those same social forces have removed people from these communities who are best-equipped to inform their peers in the community about the risks and lies presented by opportunistic pariahs that are exploiting them.
And so garbage people step in to fill the void left by fleeing wealth, youth, the educated and equally problematic -- very few are left to combat this. Anger, despondency, self destructive behaviors (e.g., drug abuse) follow. The political leadership and elites that ARE available in these places are themselves self-sorted into the sort of authoritarian, Trumpian mindset -- the leadership and elites in these towns see themselves as rightfully and justifiably able to exploit and lie to the locals and recognize that lying and fostering resentment at the changing social order is a means to maintain control and power.
I think this is what confuses *some* analysis of Trumpism where we recognize that fascism is a mix of the wealthy, of local elites, and of some elements of middle class and working class whites. It's a cross-section of bourgeois and working class interests because the principle driving factors aren't precisely economic but instead a coalition of people who want iron-fisted maintenance of the current social order (parasitic, rent-seeking elites) AND the increasingly despondent who have seen their social standing erode and are desperately seeking a return to the old social order (e.g., old whites, poorer whites) where they think their dignity and political power rests (e.g., the rhetorical power of MAGA among these people).
Empirically:
The most Trumpian voters are 1) the locally segregated elites in these towns who are pariahs and maintainers of the current social order in them and 2) the victims of the charade, externalizing their anger and despair onto the changing social order (correctly) and latching onto authoritarian solutions and rhetoric promising a return to the old, cherished social order now long abandoned.
The result is a nascent and growing authoritarianism due to a classic feedback loop wherein vast social and economic changes leave a certain subset of people vulnerable to exploitation, and opportunistic/parasitic elites step in to exploit it, and the result is a small but powerful and economically inter-sectional political coalition where authoritarian solutions become preferable and desired. It's underlying a lot of the oppositional culture we see brewing in right-wing America.
America has this sort of 'bad luck' thing wherein the political system was design to aggrandize the political power of literal physical spaces (more correctly, property owners) over rote population counts, and so our political system is especially susceptible to this kind of coalition that is not especially robust but DOES predominate over large land areas to acquire undue amounts of political power.
Last edited by DVaut1; 07-18-2018 at 04:02 AM.