Now is the Time of Monsters
The vast majority of us in the West are still floating along, sleepwalking, unaware of what's happening.
When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.
But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.
A well planned campaign of control and retribution followed. I feel Trump is really going for it, pushing constitutional limits on multiple fronts, testing how far he can go. Watching his impromptu news shows in the Oval Office, I get flashes of how dangerous he really is. His monologues are mesmerizing. In a folksy, relaxed way, he rambles on about the issues of the day... lying profusely along the way, but it doesn't seem to matter... what matters is that he is connecting with ordinary Americans... much like Franklin Roosevelt connected with his fireside radio chats in the 1940s... and like Hitler's fiery speeches connected with the German people in the 1930s. Half way through one of his recent monologues I felt myself falling under his spell... a shiver shot down my spine... that's it!... he's on his way and he'll never stop until, like the Yalta Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin after World War 2, he sits around a table with Xi JinPing and Putin (perhaps MBS will be there too), and divides the world up into three great power spheres of influence.
The vast majority of us in the West are still floating along, sleepwalking, unaware of what's happening. But some of us are wide awake and we've reached our breaking point... we're ready to go all in. I'm going to tattoo a blackspot on a knuckle of my punching hand and take my activism to a new level. I invite you to do the same. First in our cities, and then across the globe, let's forge a secret society of blackspotters fired up enough to go out every #FuckItAllFriday and neutralize this totalitarian techno-fascist wave rolling over our planet.
— Kalle Lasn (from Adbusters Issue 178: A New Left)
RepubliKKKons have used first generation advertising techniques to mesmerize the 45% that doesn't read, that have never been outside their own trailer park or hamlet, don't have a clue about compound interest, think food is breaded, fried, then stored in a warming tray, and covered in gravy.
The right wing figures you call out came to popularity almost as a direct result of left wing extremism (which is an authoratarianism of its own).
And you cannot really skip over the fact that Trump rose to popularity calling out the excesses of gloablist neoliberalism and championing a form of economic populism that once would have been popular with much of the traditional/mainstream left. He also pretended to be anti-war.
I agree that Trump has taken an authoratarian turn, but there is something much deeper going on than right-left politics. In fact, if the masses could break away from left-right party bias, there's actually a unique opportunity right now to unite the populist dissidents on both sides (at least on foreign policy and some economic issues).