A lot of the other answers in this thread strike me as dumb (no offense) but this seems much closer. Once economic disparity hits hard, people tend to blame the other. What kind of surprises me is there hasn't been a communist/anarchist resurgence around the world alongside it. Today's conditions do somewhat remind me of pre Spanish civil war .
Facebook and Twitter are both responsible and cultivated the continued eroding of the truth and disinformation in society. Either through a lack of moderation or tossing a blind eye to those doing so intentionally. People seeking comfort in false narratives IS a result of the recession, but the platforms could have easily avoided it.
You know it.
Brexit voters either voted for obvious appeals to fascism or they voted alongside it. It's a distinction without a difference, in my eyes.
Because communisms failures are well documented while social democratic apartheid states have been shown to be actually functional despite the moral bankruptcy.
In a two way referendum where one side is running racists ads. Very much yes.
They have a point though
No, Brexit as a concept isn't fascism.
This is the kind of thinking that's going to make it even more difficult to come up with effective ways of combating fascism. No, it is not just being spread by Russia.
There are certainly different levels of this. You can be an active supporter of it or passively let it happen because you have some of the same goals. It's like how over here in the States so many people vote Republican solely on abortion. Nothing else even remotely matters to them so now they are supporting fascists because they don't want to "kill babies" and yet their President is literally killing children.
Neoliberalism casts the individual as an enterprise - most importantly, a failed enterprise, since the vast majority of people will never achieve anything significant in life due to factors that are often out of their control. They can't because a neoliberal society isn't set up to be interdependent or inclusive. So they buy things, to buttress their deeper sense of themselves being economically unviable. The meaning from consumption dresses the wounds of meaninglessness derived from being unable to reach the particular kind of achievement sensibility that grows out of neoliberalism. People then look to a politics that reflects the autonomy they lack, they take strength from leaders that tell them others are at fault for their failures, the failures that are ultimately created by the politics they so eagerly come to follow through this deception. It's everybody but them, but 'us'. Outsiders (minorities) are the ones who create all the problems. The turn to facism is not far at this point. Doesn't help that centuries of racist indoctrination are ingrained into these people as well.
Hitler was democratically elected, it's nice to know he wasn't a fascist.
