No Stupid Questions

So at most we are talking a bit over 200 years that might be relevant to this. Just fyi if this is unique its not been a possibility for very long history wise.

Indeed. It happened in Germany in the 30s. It lasted until the country was utterly destroyed and tens of millions of people were killed.

You gotta stop thinking of it as a left/right thing. It doesn't exist. It's clouding your perspective. Populists vs establishment might be a better way to categorize if you needed just two groups, but that's still too simplistic.

The world is a messy place with lots of different groups trying to get power, enrich themselves, and push their ideology. Whatever ideology a group is pushing has little to do with having the moral high ground and will typically result in their own benefit.

I think last time this happened a bunch of anti media consolidation laws were passed to prevent rich people from owning everything (unfortunately they were repealed in the 90s in the US) Also taxes, wars. Basically rich people will fund wars to ensure people don't take their money but in doing so they destroy their money because wars kill workers, destroy products and produce nothing of value.

Its easier just to tax rich people and break up the large conglomorates they're using to rig everything. Tech companies would need to be included here. Idk why there isn't a massive tax on all kinds of bad corporate behaviors that lead here: buying companies, mergers, stock buybacks and corporate real estate shenanigans should all have serious taxes associated with them.

There's nothing quite like today. There's things that are similar, but social media has really made things worse.

Populism is rising because things haven't been great for a lot of people for a long time, and it's too hard to ignore anymore. Globalism and free trade were massively oversold to the masses, it hurt wide swaths of people that have been ignored for decades. People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.

Social media has escalated everything as well. The echo chambers are enormous and essentially impossible to avoid. Many traditional institutions are also extremely weak now that would have forced more interaction between people with differing views and limited extremism. Social media also does a great job in conflating the size of various groups and beliefs, a few dozen people can make a community seem as large and impactful as a few thousand .

Not exactly. I am old enough to remember wondering why gay couples couldn't get legal marriage, and when interracial couples were stared at, and the ozone layer had a hole, and the Satanic Panic, but it felt like we were in a shitty spot but moving in the right direction just painfully slowly. Lots more violence than now.

Something common I see in all these parties is strong disaffection with the current state of their countries and a longing to an idealized past they promise to bring back, to make countries great again…

The past cannot come back, neither will it come back just because some people want it to. It’s completely futile, but people are not rational about this, they’re completely emotional and tribal.

Yes, societies are going through the five stages of grief:

• denial (there are no problems, and if there are, they're the 's fault)
• anger (vote for a strongman) <-- you are here
• bargaining (maybe we can partially go back to the better past)
• depression (this sucks, nothing can be done about it)
• acceptance (well, let's look forward and make the best out of it)

In ww2 Europe 65-75 people had to die before the pendulum swung back. The far right always is responsible for millions of deaths when in control. I think the best prevention would be identifying people with narcissistic and psychopathic personalities and not let them become leaders. We currently reward them in our system

It lasted most of history. It seems like every time society shifts to the left, it only lasts for a few generations before it dies under autocratic control.

Evil always gets ahead because it's willing to do anything to "win." Good? Not so much. (Well actual good, anyway - not that fake shit that does things claiming their "Good Book" backs them up on it, for example.)

The only reason Good gets control every so often is because Evil is too focused on "winning" & ultimately inadvertently destroys its own foundations in order to do so. Once it figures out how to avoid that, we're really screwed.

The closest example of that I can think of is China's current leader. I'll grant many will somewhat rightly claim he's done a lot of good over there, but he's definitely accomplished a fair bit of it through some significant evils.

I've been alive for almost 41 years and this is the first time I've seen anything like this with my own eyes. All other examples happened decades before I was born. The biggest and, HOPEFULLY, most well know example would be Germany in the late 1930s.

Yes, in 1930s. Lasted till 1945.

Until a war, famine or plague was terrible enough to make people realize that most of their social differences weren’t as important as they thought and they had to rally round an ideal to survive.

Berlin 1939

Humans being awful is most of our entire written history. Bill Wurst has the cliff notes:

https://youtu.be/xuCn8ux2gbs

The powerful made themselves divine deities directly or made up religions where the deity gave them power over others. Conquest, war, rape, tribalism, raids, corruption, oppression, suppression, slavery, spice trade, disease, volancoes causing crop failures and wiping out empires, or causing starving pirate raids who did the same, ice ages causing genetic bottle necks where we almost go extinct, whatever.

You could read David Mitchell's recent book "Unruly" about the ~1600 years of violent dumb misery following the fall of Rome just in the land whuch became the U.K. if you like. Pretty dry material but he does his best as a comedian to get through it all. It's a very long list of short lived Kings (and a couple Queens) murdering each other and peasants while the Northerners did the same and eventually settled and interbred and continued murdering each other and living short violent dumb lives. A lot of them aspired to be like a fictional King Arthur. There's your yearning for past glories. A little like today. It's not real, it's fantasy.

Until the printing press and the renaissance, sort of. Temporarily destabilised the powerful. Kinda like the internet. Or radio broadcast I suppose. The old guard didn't know how to exploit it at first. Printing press fucked up the massively corrupt Catholics at the time, fresh off their crusades and coming up with the idea of paying money to get into heaven. They really hated the idea of peasants learning how to read too. Martin Luther had a bunch of reasons they sucked. One was a complaint about how many little boys each priest kept. Nothing new under the Sun.

Relating any of it to the "right wing" becomes incoherent in a hurry when trying to compare things to modernity. Conservatives are what Royalists became after people kept cutting Royal heads off. Suffice to say though, it was shit fucking awful almost all the time humans have existed.

Looking to the future with climate change in a few hundred years and I expect way more extremism and a lot of death fighting and starving over the dwindling habitable land near the poles.

Eventually the Sun gets too hot even if we were perfect and peaceful and the oceans boil into space. Long before the Red Giant phase swallows the scorched Earth entirely. The end.

Anyways, I've deliberately sterilised myself.

It's all... perspective and relative ?

The UK oversaw the slaughter of Kenyans in the Mau Mau rebellion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366?wprov=sfla1

The CIA helping Suharto slaughter Indonesians in a genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366?wprov=sfla1

Israel's existence is becase the US and UK taking native lands

The Kurds were supposed to be free but too much Oil and that was stopped.

Around 80 years ago, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) wrote this:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue.

Somewhat more recently, Wendell Berry, in an essay entitled "Word and Flesh", wrote this:

This statement of Orwell's is clearly applicable to our situation now; all we need to do is change a few nouns. The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do.

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.” ― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

We pretend we've been anything other then fascist since ...? Most (many) German's in Nazi Germany lived good lives, like most in the developed world have been living.