The West was moving to the right — and then Donald Trump got elected again
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Something is happening among America’s allies, and it’s a tremendous relief. For some years now, we’ve seen the MAGA-infused global right gaining a foothold amongst western democracies, largely driven by the same demagogic, nationalist, pseudo-populism that has fueled Donald Trump’s dominance on the American right.
Some countries like Hungary have served as a sort of experiment for the kind of post-democratic autocracies dreamt of by the modern right wing in which government co-opts, intimidates and de-legitimizes the political opposition to create an authoritarianism that dominates the culture and the politics without a lot of overt violence.
But the rise of the far right among the Western allies seems to be stalling out.
That combined with the fact that the US in many ways is a confederation jury rigged into a federation doesn’t help. Even if we killed every white person in the South after the civil war I suspect we would still be dealing with the same basil issues just with a different coat of paint. Most of the issues are caused by regional issues, proto-nationalism, and a failing Imperial identity.
While it’s true that tribalism is essentially a human, if not evolutionary trait, we could have made it damn near harder for fascists from gaining power. To start, stripping them from any political office (local or federal) and then banning them or any soldier that fought for the Confederacy.
States that seceded basically should have been converted to non-voting territories unless they agreed whole cloth to codify abolition into the Constitution, reparations to the North and to their slaves.