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If you live in Europe and think your democratic system is resistant to these things: it’s not.
Don’t wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.
Italy elected Berlusconi (a corrupted tycoon who had ties with the mafia and bribed his way to the top of the Italian broadcasting world) in 1994. Y’all just catching up.
RIP Berlusconi.
Rest in poop?
Absolutely, over here we’ve recently elected a horrible party as the biggest one, with 25% of the votes. Dark times.
The difference is that in many European countries the head of state is more of a ceremonial position (at least in practice) and the head of the government holds nowhere near the amount of power a US president does. With proportional representation, the biggest party often doesn’t have an absolute majority and needs to form a government together with other parties, or might even end up in the opposition. Together they agree on who’s going to be the head of government (usually the head of the largest party), who will be the ministers and what will be the policy. If it doesn’t work out because of disagreements, the government breaks up and new elections will be held.
My point is: the risk is real, populism is growing, policy is shifting, but the dynamics are different. Having a first past the post system and concentrating so much power into a single political position feels like an accelerator.
Don’t wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.
No worries, he already has been elected last year!
Dick Schoof (yes, English speakers, that really is his legal name) is our Trump?
I’d say Geert Wilders matches that description, and he did not become PM…
Dick Schoof didn’t get elected though, at least not by the people… Wilders was
Correction: Wilders received the most votes from the people, but could not become PM as his party needed to form coalitions to gain enough seats. Essentially, he did not get elected PM because most others did not want to work together with him.
Was our parliament filled with lunatics vehemently agreeing with him, we’d have Wilders as PM.
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And yet the “blame everything on immigrants” strategy seems to work quite well here too.
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I see you’re already on the right track to a fascistic ideology. Way to prove me right.
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You are literally parroting the talking points of fascists, though?
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People don’t want to leave their homes to begin with, only to face people like you. Make sure you don’t vote for politicians who promote wars or instability if you don’t want anymore refugees. Your right wing politicians are pro-Israel so they will be causing more refugees to move to Europe and they probably don’t realize it.
far less trusts politicians
crazy thing is… that is the exact reason why trump is winning in the States. Someone comes along, crass, rude, claiming to be a layman and the people here ate that up, thinking “now here is a person like us, not like the established politician class” and despite the rhetoric, or due to it, along with suppression and disinformation, he got elected.
Tbf a bunch of racist, misogynist, homophobic, idiots saw a racist, misogynist, homophobic, idiot and went “he just like me fr.” And they are probably right about that.
Whoever thinks Trump is ‘people like us’ can drown in piss
How can someone think a spoiled rich boy is one of the working class?
Eroding education seems to work for those shitheads…
Just wait a bit. It’ll crack sooner or later.
This is fascism 101.
Fascism is at least as much an economic system as a political one, or more precisely, it’s more like an economic system hiding behind a political system.
And the way the economic system works is very simple - private ownership of the means of production combined with an overt and institutionalized revolving door between business and government, so that the end result is plutocratic oligarchy.
Basically, it’s taking the system that already existed in the US, by which the wealthy bought access to political power mostly surreptitiously and nominally illegally unless they followed specific restrictions, and legitimizes and formalizes and institutionalizes it and moves it right out into the open.
And behind all of the white supremacist and christian nationalist and reactionary conservative rhetoric, this was always the real goal.
If the numbers are true it costed him less than 0.1% of his wealth which is surprising how little it takes. Would you spend 0.1% of your wealth to elect a President and gain a government post that will bring you more wealth? Would you spend 1% of your wealth to become insanely rich? 10%?
In the society where power is measured by wealth ultra rich should not exist. Or better such society should not exist.
Also Musk wasn’t even the biggest donor. And Harris was okay with this whole thing, she also received enormous donations. Who was against ultra rich? Bernie Sanders. No wonder he was sacked despite popular support.
No I wouldnt spend 1 percent of my wealth to become insanely rich. Mostly cause that implies corruption and I aint nearly as bad as my kin though I have far more homicidal tendencies.
nah, I like the Bannana man’s method better. reference- Bannana man in honduras
Speedrunning the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
We’re already speedrunning climate-based societal collapse, so there’s not really much time to slow walk these things.
What an absolute treasure Robert and Sam Reich are.
He also spent 44 billion buying twitter to disrupt and control the conversations happening there as part of his efforts, and now the the government essentially has a data mining tool and propaganda machine without actually ‘owning’ it.
Last stage democracy
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We don’t need to be such downers about it.
Let’s just celebrate this as the age of facilitating future dolphin supremacy!
We sucked hard, I have faith that they can do better because I can’t really imagine how a sapient species could find a way to do even worse.
Plus late stage capitalism.
* plutocracy
Any of those 2a weirdos gonna show us what 2a is for or not?
I see a lot of domestic enemies around and suddenly the obese, insanely loud dipshits aren’t making a peep.
No, they love the boot on their face, as long as someone they hate also has a boot on their face.
To be fair, a couple of them already tried.
Looks like it’s time for the left to start collecting guns and trigger the “wait, not like that!” response from the republicans.
As a 2A advocate, I’ve recently considered buying my first gun. I don’t own one mostly because I have young kids and I don’t want to risk them playing with it and getting hurt, but there have also been a some incidents where people got shot due to road rage, and it would be nice to have an option to defend myself.
That said, regardless of how many or what kinds of guns I end up owning, there’s no way I’m using them against the government, there’s zero chance that ends well for anyone.
You can’t have a democracy if you can’t hold it accountable. Violence is the last option, of course. But it must be an option in the face of the threat of more violence. Fascists will always exploit this weakness in liberalism.
Sure, and if I felt we were actually facing a fascist takeover, I’d reconsider my options (and probably move elsewhere). But I don’t, I’m more worried about the crazies on the roads that got something messed up from COVID or something and are taking it out on drivers.
Trump is certainly going to mess some stuff up that I care about, but I believe he’ll leave in 4 years and we’ll have another idiot in power, but hopefully one that brings us forward and undoes some of Trump’s mess.
We’re not going to see concentration camps or death squads, so a gun won’t be helpful there. I’m far more worried about random crazies getting more bold and threatening my family.
Turns out it really is all a big club and we didn’t get invited.
Carlin had it right 30 years ago
yes for him the USA is just a high return investment and livelihoods of the US citizens are just expandibles.
I wish I had a schilling
for every senseless killing
I’d buy a government
America’s for sale
And you can get a good deal on it
And make a healthy profit
Or maybe tear it apart
Start with assumption
That a million people are smart
Smarter than one
The term is crony capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalismJust capitalism taken to the logical conclusion. This term implies there’s some form of capitalism in which this doesn’t happen. There is not.
I guess technically he spent $44.13 billion
Now look how much money Kamala received to “buy” the election.
The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024
woops
I mean, yeah, but they’d be in a better position to make that argument if they hadn’t been campaigning with Mark Cuban. (Not that Robert Reich needs to be told that, but it still needs to be said.)
