January 20, 2017: The Day Democracy Died
A few days ago, I published a piece that carried the following title: "How The Alt-Right Blogosphere Is Destroying Society."
Unsurprisingly, some members of the very same alt-right blogosphere were displeased with my indictment of their verbal crusade.
To be clear, it was never my intention to suggest that everyone who writes under the populist banner is a bad person. In fact, implicit in the article linked above is the proposition that many of those who spend their days spilling digital in
H this is what happens every time in history when money changers get control of the reins, because of greed it all collapses
Thank you for proving Heisenberg’s point. Antisemitic fool.
WOW!!
H and another thing as invaluable as the information is that you freely put out, thank you ! Thank you! In many ways you are with out a doubt a bad Samaritan (ha-joon-Chang) you made it to the top of the mountain!, and it is clear you took the ladder with you
Wait a minute. You have no problem making a million on the stupidity of the masses, yet you are surprised when the masses rise up and revolt against this very thing?
If I am reading you correctly, this is the third time in the last few days where you have equated populism in Europe with a right-wing political movement. This is incorrect.
Populism is neither right or left but involves an appeal to the interests of the citizens against those of the elite. There are populists of the right in the the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Belgium. There are populists of the left in Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy.
You also seem to believe that right wing populists are anti-democracy. I don’t see any real sign of that. They are all running in democratic elections and none of them overtly oppose democracy. Would Marine Le Pen move to curtail democracy if she was in power? I think so but it’s just conjecture on my part. The only two EU countries I am aware of where democracy is under attack are Poland and Hungary whose controlling political parties are hardly populist.
If populism in Europe is one thing, it would be against the agenda promoting inequality to which the EU/EZ institutions require adherence. The only populist party I’m aware of that is in favor of austerity/neoliberalism is the AfD (They’re German. What did you expect?). The EC, ECB, finance ministers, et. al. require reforms to be implemented by EU countries that include reduction in wages, reduction in job protections, reduction in benefits to protect the unemployed, and curtailing the ability of unions to represent workers.
For the most part the EU centrist parties (left and right) buy into the neoliberal agenda of inequality. They also, for the most part, buy into the anti-immigrant/ nationalistic right wing agenda. In France, where I live, Fillon, the center-right candidate fits that description but so does the leading candidate from the center left Socialist party, Valles. BTW as a senator Fillon voted against decriminalizing homosexuality. As Minister of the Interior Valls called for the expulsion of the Roma people because they were incapable of becoming French. The last time France expelled an ethnic minority it was the Jews in the second century.