Comment by Herring
4 hours ago
The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but support drops drastically when you talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Eg implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.
Economics on its own is probably not sufficient either. You probably also need widespread unionization, a Cordon Sanitaire, and probably German-style intelligence surveillance of the far-right too.
This isn't a taxes issue. The assault on higher education and the sciences by this administration is inseparable from the assault on minorities and free speech. This is the authoritarian playbook 101. Mao went as far as locking up all the PhD's and sending them to work camps.
Not taxes. Authoritarianism.
Yes it's a taxes issue, because that's how you pay for European-style safety nets. And again that's probably not enough either, cause Denmark/Netherlands are having issues with housing causing the far-right to surge. So you probably need Vienna-style public housing too. The US is so far from the correct solutions you're not even on the same planet.
This has nothing to do with funding.
The US is spending $892.6 billion on the military, $11.3B on ICE, and planning to spend $400 million building a fucking ballroom.
It's about authoritarianism.
4 replies →
You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with.
But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.
Any sources on that debunking? I can't say I've seen anything, but I'm open to read about it. Intuitively any societal problems like cost of living will feed into the far-right narrative that the elites are incompetent. All kinds of incumbents lost ground worldwide after Covid. And last I read the consensus is housing is a big contributor to the far-right issues in Denmark and the Netherlands.
But sure, if you want to add "break up big tech" and "regulate social media" to the shopping cart I'm totally up for it.