The West was moving to the right — and then Donald Trump got elected again
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Something is happening among America’s allies, and it’s a tremendous relief. For some years now, we’ve seen the MAGA-infused global right gaining a foothold amongst western democracies, largely driven by the same demagogic, nationalist, pseudo-populism that has fueled Donald Trump’s dominance on the American right.
Some countries like Hungary have served as a sort of experiment for the kind of post-democratic autocracies dreamt of by the modern right wing in which government co-opts, intimidates and de-legitimizes the political opposition to create an authoritarianism that dominates the culture and the politics without a lot of overt violence.
But the rise of the far right among the Western allies seems to be stalling out.
I can’t speak for all of us, but I don’t think “the world” at large ever supported “Trumpism” and we largely have always thought him to be a gigantic tit and those who voted him into office TWICE to be idiotic or miseducated.
If you replace “Trumpism” with “fascism”, it has clearly been on the rise all around the world for a decade or so now, and it’s taking over more and more countries all the time. However it’s far from clear that we’ve reached any kind of turning point where fascism starts to become less popular worldwide, just because of some fairly limp election results in Canada and Australia.