Comment by relaxing
12 days ago
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 like that, but I'm open to read about it. Intuitively any societal problems like cost of living will feed into the far-right recruitment 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 absolutely up for it.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/politicalscience_facpubs/1/
Re: regulation Ah but you’ve forgotten to think higher order, for how can a right wing government financed by big tech break up big tech? Such action will have to come from beyond the government regulatory bodies…
> Additionally, the model demonstrates that racial resentment is a far greater predictor of White support for Donald Trump than measures that capture economic anxiety.
That paper isn't quite saying the same thing I'm saying.
Author wants to argue racism is a bigger factor, sure that's fine with me. I think he's probably right. My point is economic anxiety is also a factor, and more importantly it's modifiable. It's a lot easier to pass healthcare/unemployment/etc laws than to convince millions of racists about literally anything, they're so dumb.
And I'd prefer if the paper was studying multiple countries to get a better picture. There's a (negative) correlation between robust welfare states and far-right penetration. It's weakening a little lately for various reasons, but it's there.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...