Realistically I think you should probably expect that a third of the parliament of any European country are likely to be insane people from now on. The goal is to keep that the ceiling. This may be pessimistic but this is linked to that being the proportion of our citizens which are insane
Agree. (Also ideally that insane proportion is diffused through multiple political parties, i.e, don't do stupid shit like Macron's re-elect and go out of your way to destroy the centre-right.)
I'd find talk about "loonies" and "insane" problematic anyway, but the tacit assumption that sanity lies with further application of centrist managerialism is utterly complacent. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and all that?
I despise Macron and I would have voted for the left. I just subscribe to the unbelievably controversial viewpoint that people mainly vote for fascist parties because they are in fact ravenous ultranationalists who want a strongperson in charge, not some mythical Mass Alienation that excuses them.
tbh I think the explanation is much closer to the second than the first - people vote fascist when the fascists are the only ones who are even pretending to listen to them. the big thing that the political class has forgotten is that not being listened to is absolutely intolerable for humans
There’s this zombie idea that democrats have stopped listening to the concerns of the working class in red states, and republicans have been attentive to their concerns, and such that it’s true it’s only true because their concerns are bad and harmful ones that republicans share.
I think for the word "zombie" you need to substitute the word "accurate". people were warning about this at the time of NAFTA and substantially everything they warned about has happened
1. NAFTA is 30 years old. 2. Unemployment was down for decades after its implementation. 3. While some jobs were lost, others were gained and it's impossible to pin everything on NAFTA during a time of great change, particularly in the growth of Chinese manufacturing
Very true. There's a great museum in Japan where you can see the sea change coming earlier than NAFTA with automation and by the 90s, there are "robots" doing most of the automobile manufacturing
