The dark future of far-right Trumpist politics is coming into view

[Nevilledog]

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Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
Something ominous is happening. The fusion of anti-mask hysteria and demonizing of migrants for Covid points to a new politics, a form of ethno-nationalist cruelty and scapegoating for future global problems that we should prepare for right now. My latest:

Opinion | The dark future of far-right Trumpist politics is coming into view
The combination of anti-mask derangement and ethnonationalist cruelty bodes badly.
washingtonpost.com
8:23 AM · Aug 26, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/dark-future-far-right-trumpist-politics-is-coming-into-view/

*snip*

The future of authoritarian populism

A new book helps us make sense of this. Called “The End of the End of History,” it projects the future of global politics at a moment when western liberal democracy’s future no longer seems assured, as the allusion to Francis Fukuyama’s famous (and misrepresented) thesis suggests.

This sort of increasingly virulent reactionary politics forms one of the “ideologies of the future,” imagined by co-authors Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe. They posit a future authoritarian populism fusing a longing for “strongman” leaders with a “Malthusian narrative.”

This narrative sees pressing global challenges as an opening to build up a zero sum ideology that emphasizes “limited resources” and a “need to reduce surplus populations” by “removing outsiders and other elements” that corrupt the “indigenous” population, as the Real Answer to those challenges.

What’s relevant for us here is the book’s argument that covid has provided this form of politics with a new reason for being, a moment it will seize by telling a “nationalist” story of the global pandemic:

A nationalist interpretation would see a forceful rejection of globalization and cosmopolitanism: the organic body of the indigenous nation is threatened by deleterious outside influences, and limits on resources necessitate their exclusion.

*snip*

[orwell]

1. It is the last gasp...

...of a failing ideology.

It could go on for decades but it is guaranteed to fail.

You either come up with solutions, or you will be relegated to the ash heap of history.

This path will end in failure...