Fascism is the New Black

[mrt144]

My biggest fear is fealty to corporations because their is no political will to look out for the best interests of the citizenry. A return to prevent 19th century labor conditions.

 

[Tee Kay]

Hahaha there is no amount of education can spur critical thinking or self reflection on why we believe what do. Also engineers are notoriously conservative almost in spite of their education.

Doctors, too. In fact, just about any highly-educated skilled professionals.

 

[Lord of Elves]

My biggest fear is fealty to corporations because their is no political will to look out for the best interests of the citizenry. A return to prevent 19th century labor conditions.

While this neo-feudalism is undoubtedly the direction we are headed in, it need not be so direct or blatant in our lifetimes. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is the creation of a state apparatus that provides no public amenities, no public goods and heeds no public mandate, but instead exists only to protect private property.

Such a state - empowered only to destroy and repress - is the goal of "small government" conservatives crypto-fascists who stand to gain from putting the rest of mankind in chains.

 

[Vectors]

My experience with CivFanatics has been the website maintains a contingent of prolific posters who describe themselves as "reactionaries," and I address this thread primarily to them. What - in your opinion - accounts for the resurgence of "hard" right wing ideologies throughout the developed world? How can people, especially the young in regions that consume American mass media, embrace reactionary principles that have become actively taboo in many circles? Is this the culture war? Who is winning the culture war?

To posters with more mainstream views, I posit that Western democracy's greatest threat is the resurgence of authoritarian, right wing beliefs in the Anglo-European middle and working classes. I point to the emergence of the Tea Party in the United States, the rise of the UKIP in Britain, and the overall amazing performance of hard right political parties throughout Europe for evidence of this assertion. This is especially dispiriting news in light of the resurgence of the far right in Scandinavia, which is usually considered to be the success story of social democracy. If Scandinavia represents the neoliberal ideal, why are voters actively rejecting the best possible government? Many people will trot out arguments along the line that voters who are disillusioned with centrist, neoliberal politics are simply throwing in their lot with the most convenient alternative in a cycle where the incumbent always loses. I believe that this is untrue, and that the resurgence of the far right is a salient movement that should be recognized as a fundamental change in what the voting public throughout the "free world" thinks. Why?

I believe that if current trends continue, we will live to witness the return of fascism, or various and sundry forms of tyranny that masquerade under prettier names. Many model democracies, the United States included, are riven with social and cultural strife that demagogues like this man exploit to accumulate further wealth and power. These snake oil salesmen of authoritarianism have for many decades convinced the people of at least one powerful democracy to act against their own economic interests and contend to use mass media to convince millions of people to willingly surrender their freedom.

As same-sex marriage and recreational drug use is legalized across the United States, what are we supposed to make of people like this?

Spoiler :

I dig his style though, Docs every day

Are they simply loonies who are left behind in the past, or do they represent the iceberg's tip of a segment of society that rejects the freedoms of individualism and multiculturalism?

I'm not a prolific poster nor have I been here long, but I do happen to view the Republican party as a bunch of dirty neoliberals.

Young people today are reacting against the faithlessness and anomie of the preceding decadent generations who have bankrupted the young to pay for the largess of the old. They want structure and order which the demagogues exploit. People need something to unite them whether it be religion, ideology, a monarch, national values and if they do not then society decays and polarizes.

 

[Narz]

That is why I think our only real hope is to vastly improve the educational system. To make at least a bachelors degree completely free of charge for any citizen who wants one and can make the grades. Until we solve the problem of the voters not even being able to think critically we will continue to produce far too many racists and bigots to make any real progress.

What? More people have college degrees than ever before. I agree education should be reformed, giving everyone a degree under our current education system is unlikely to make much difference.

 

[Narz]

Doctors, too. In fact, just about any highly-educated skilled professionals.

If there's one thing I've learned on CFC its that education & traditional measures of intelligence (high IQ, scoring well on multiple choice tests) have no correlation with having rational political views or rational views in general.

As an example someone here on CFC (a few years back when there were more dicks) tried to troll my argument by touting the Dunning-Kruger effect to "prove" that stupid people tend to overestimate themselves more than the smart. He missed the boat entirely. It's the unskilled who overestimate their abilities, general intelligence has nothing to do with it & actually makes it worse (thinking you're "naturally" smart is the problem). IIRC, those who were most suspectable to this effect were.... college professors. These stats are IIRC so feel free to correct but from what I recall something like 70+% of people think they are above-average drivers. Among college professors I remember it being something insane like 97% of college professors thinking they were above average. So much for college making one more rational/objective.

The thread was something like Intelligence vs Wisdom or something like that.

 

[Tahuti]

I think it is fair to say that the persecution of and discrimination against Jews, which existed virtually everywhere in Western civilization at the time, is strikingly similar to the attitudes that many still have towards immigrants. The only thing that has really changed over time are the principal victims of xenophobia. And it frequently has a religious component centering on Christianity versus another religion, or even Catholicism versus Protestantism, or even towards specific Christian sects. It is as though many Christians willfully disregard much of the New Testament.

With the exception of Spain's concept of 'blood impurity', antisemitism did not truly exist in medieval Europe, since antisemitism is racially based. Medieval European persecution of Jews was comparable to inter-Christian persecution in that members of a given denomination were not viewed as a separate race.

Again with the exception of Spain and the Jesuits, the idea that one could never cease to be Jewish did not gain any popular currency until the 19th century.

I'm not a prolific poster nor have I been here long, but I do happen to view the Republican party as a bunch of dirty neoliberals.

If the GOP are 'neoliberals', who are the 'paleoliberals' here?

 

[aelf]

If Scandinavia represents the neoliberal ideal, why are voters actively rejecting the best possible government? Many people will trot out arguments along the line that voters who are disillusioned with centrist, neoliberal politics are simply throwing in their lot with the most convenient alternative in a cycle where the incumbent always loses. I believe that this is untrue, and that the resurgence of the far right is a salient movement that should be recognized as a fundamental change in what the voting public throughout the "free world" thinks.

But I do think the failure of 'moderate' politics is the main contributing factor.

Moderate politics is popular amongst the well-educated middle (and lower) classes - the idea that political matters should be settled only through polite discussion via official/public channels, which is a task largely delegated to the elected representatives of the people. Undermining this nice little narrative is the existence and prevalence of corrupt political systems in which moneyed and powerful interests undercut public discussion through their influence and back-room deals that the public is not often privy to. This parallel democracy of the privileged is what neoliberalism is essentially driven by, and a lot of people are understandably tired of it.

The problem is somehow the strident messages being broadcast by right-wing groups are more palatable to the public than their left-wing counterparts'. Maybe this has to do with how right-wing causes tend to appeal to people's greed and fear, which are very powerful motivators.

 

[Tahuti]

The problem is somehow the strident messages being broadcast by right-wing groups are more palatable to the public than their left-wing counterparts'. Maybe this has to do with how right-wing causes tend to appeal to people's greed and fear, which are very powerful motivators.

Centre-rightists use easier to understand language and easier explainable political logic. Too much crime by immigrants? Deport immigrants and impose tougher sentences.

Now, I'm not attacking right-wing beliefs: Sometimes the simplest logic is also the best. Occam's Razor and all that. Left-wing beliefs are seen as increasingly bookish. In enormous contrast to the early 20th century when Right-Wing ideology was seen as more esoteric.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

This is the New Black? Isn't his kind ridiculed in politics, media and in all but the crummiest places on the Internet? I don't see his kind trending, but I understand the annoyance in the Left as they keep losing influence to populists on the Right/Social Conservatives. Something that seemed unfathomable for them just a few years ago.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Hahaha there is no amount of education can spur critical thinking or self reflection on why we believe what do. Also engineers are notoriously conservative almost in spite of their education.

Those who are college educated are clearly more liberal and able to think critically better than their counterparts typically are. This is why so many Republicans try so hard to literally destroy decent public educational systems and to turn them into their own indoctrination facilities.

Engineers also get an incredibly crippled college degree in regard to the liberal arts which is radically different than most any other. You might even consider it as an advanced trade school conducted on typically special college grounds. This actually reinforces my point. But to solve it you would have to make engineering an advanced degree earned after a traditional liberal arts bachelors degree.

With the exception of Spain's concept of 'blood impurity', antisemitism did not truly exist in medieval Europe, since antisemitism is racially based. Medieval European persecution of Jews was comparable to inter-Christian persecution in that members of a given denomination were not viewed as a separate race.

So who was discussing medieval Europe other than yourself?

History of antisemitism in the United States

There were only about 12 Jews living in North America in the 17th century. These faced a number of restrictions, including being banned from practicing law, medicine, art, and other professions. As late as 1790, one year before adoption of the Bill of Rights, several states had religious tests for holding public office, and Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Carolina still maintained established churches. Within a few years of the ratification of the Constitution, Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia eliminated barriers that prevented Jews from voting, but these barriers did not fall for many decades in Rhode Island (1842), North Carolina (1868), and New Hampshire (1877). Despite these restrictions, which were often enforced unevenly, there were really too few Jews in 17th- and 18th-century America for antisemitism to become a significant social or political phenomenon at the time (although antisemitism as a phenomenon does not depend on the presence of Jews). And the evolution from toleration to full civil and political equality for Jews that followed the American Revolution helped ensure that antisemitism would never become official government policy, as it had in Europe.

By 1840, Jews constituted a tiny, but nonetheless stable, middle-class minority of about 15,000 out of the 17 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census. Jews intermarried rather freely with non-Jews, continuing a trend that had begun at least a century earlier. However, as immigration increased the Jewish population to 50,000 by 1848, negative stereotypes of Jews in newspapers, literature, drama, art, and popular culture grew more commonplace and physical attacks became more frequent.

Nineteenth century

According to Peter Knight, throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States rarely experienced antisemitic action comparable to the sort that was endemic in Europe during the same period.[2]

Civil War

By the time of the Civil War, tensions over race and immigration, as well as economic competition between Jews and non-Jews, combined to produce the worst outbreak of antisemitism to that date. Americans on both sides of the slavery issue denounced Jews as disloyal war profiteers, and accused them of driving Christians out of business and of aiding and abetting the enemy.[citation needed]

Major General Ulysses S. Grant was influenced by these sentiments and issued General Order No. 11 expelling Jews from areas under his control in western Tennessee:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled …within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

This order was quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln but not until it had been enforced in a number of towns.[3] According to Jerome Chanes, Lincoln's revocation of Grant's order was based primarily on "constitutional strictures against ...the federal government singling out any group for special treatment." Chanes characterizes General Order No. 11 as "unique in the history of the United States" because it was the only overtly antisemitic official action of the United States government.[4]

Grant later issued an order "that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the road southward." His aide, Colonel John V. DuBois, ordered "all cotton speculators, Jews, and all vagabonds with no honest means of support", to leave the district. "The Israelites especially should be kept out…they are such an intolerable nuisance."

Immigration from Eastern Europe

Between 1881 and 1920, approximately 3 million Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to America, many of them fleeing pogroms and the difficult economic conditions which were widespread in much of Eastern Europe during this time. Pogroms in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, prompted waves of Jewish immigrants after 1881. Jews, along with many Eastern and Southern European immigrants, came to work the country's growing mines and factories. Many Americans distrusted these Jewish immigrants.[3]

The earlier wave of Jewish immigration from Germany, the latter (post 1880) came from the Pale of Settlement—the region of Eastern Poland, Russia and the Ukraine where Jews had suffered so under the Czars. Along with Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Jews faced discrimination in the United States in employment, education and social advancement. American groups like the Immigration Restriction League, criticized these new arrivals along with immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe, as culturally, intellectually, morally, and biologically inferior. Despite these attacks, very few Eastern European Jews returned to Europe for whatever privations they faced here, their situation in the US was still improved.

Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews immigrated to America's shores, the bulk from Eastern Europe. Where before 1900, American Jews never amounted even to 1 percent of America's total population, by 1930 Jews formed about 3.5 percent. This dramatic increase combined with the upward mobility of some Jews contributed to a resurgence of antisemitism.

As the European immigration swelled the Jewish population of the United States, there developed a growing sense of the Jew as different. Jerome Chanes attributes this perception on the fact that Jews were concentrated in a small number of occupations: they were perceived as being mostly clothing manufacturers, shopkeepers and department store owners. He notes that so-called "German Jews" (who in reality came not just from Germany but from Austria, Poland, Bohemia and other countries as well) found themselves increasingly segregated by a widespread social antisemitism that became even more prevalent in the twentieth century and which persists in vestigial form even today.[5]

There is much more there if you care to read it. But I think you should get the general idea. Antisemitism was even rampant in the country where many Jews fleed after being even more persecuted in Europe. This really didn't end until the 1960s when the Roman Catholic Church finally divested itself from passion plays which incited many Christians to hate Jews.

 

[Vectors]

With the exception of Spain's concept of 'blood impurity', antisemitism did not truly exist in medieval Europe, since antisemitism is racially based. Medieval European persecution of Jews was comparable to inter-Christian persecution in that members of a given denomination were not viewed as a separate race.

Again with the exception of Spain and the Jesuits, the idea that one could never cease to be Jewish did not gain any popular currency until the 19th century.



If the GOP are 'neoliberals', who are the 'paleoliberals' here?

The US doesn't really have paleoliberals as the US over time has shifted left substantially over her history, but much less than Europe has.

 

[QuoVadisNation]

Well...

If this had been observed in the long term, this idea would have merit. However, there's not enough evidence yet to conclude this isn't anything but short term. The losing party, especially American parties, tend to radicalize in face of the winning one. If it's not tea party members, or neo-facists / whatever, it's your Michael Moore's and your crazies complaining about "freedom speech zones," Bin Laden having fun in Hawaii under government care, and Bush starting 9/11. It's probably okay to start panicking when / if Trump wins and creates a new form of Republican in spite of reality.

I'm not perfect and often not witty. But I don't see the bigger picture here unless I already want to believe it. Plus, the throwing around of buzz words lends me to believe maybe there's a desire to believe it already.

 

[Lord of Elves]

End of the day, Tovergieter and others are right when they say that reactionaries have an easier time of making their case in plain language. That is because the plain language of us v. them tribalism is readily understood by a nation that has been ripe for fascism for decades. The challenge of the modern left is articulating the case for not stringing up undesirables in the street, as cathartic as it may be for the "moral majority" to think that such a day of reckoning is coming.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Well...

If this had been observed in the long term, this idea would have merit. However, there's not enough evidence yet to conclude this isn't anything but short term. The losing party, especially American parties, tend to radicalize in face of the winning one. If it's not tea party members, or neo-facists / whatever, it's your Michael Moore's and your crazies complaining about "freedom speech zones," Bin Laden having fun in Hawaii under government care, and Bush starting 9/11. It's probably okay to start panicking when / if Trump wins and creates a new form of Republican in spite of reality.

I'm not perfect and often not witty. But I don't see the bigger picture here unless I already want to believe it. Plus, the throwing around of buzz words lends me to believe maybe there's a desire to believe it already.

I'm sorry the way I presented my point wasn't fast and loose enough for your liking, but I think I've done a fair job of pointing out what conclusions I am drawing, and from where. I object to the use of "buzzwords," though, as if by using labels familiar to most people who follow politics I am trying to blind my audience with ideology. Unless maybe, that works?

No, in seriousness I think I've been fair to the topic, especially since I started this thread with the hope that my ideological opponents would address the questions I have. Someone smarter than me could have made the case more eloquently, but these are the points I wanted to address, and I know there are people who have thus far ignored this thread that could come from on high any time and drop some rhetorical bombs. Maybe I've been away for too long, but Off-Topic used to be a lot more right and a lot less left-contrarian.

 

[PicturesquePict]

What - in your opinion - accounts for the resurgence of "hard" right wing ideologies throughout the developed world?

My suggested answer to your question is: human biological and social evolution.

It seems that humans, just like other animals and plants, have been programmed by evolutionary selection itself, to be ethnocentric:

Check Hartshorn et al. 2013, "The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation":

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html

(...) Ethnocentrism is the tendency to favor one's own group at the expense of other groups. It is implicated in a variety of important phenomena from voting patterns to ethnic discrimination and armed conflict. (...) there is also evidence that ethnocentrism is common throughout a diverse range of animal (Chase 1980) and even plant (Dudley & File 2007; Runyon, Mescher & De Moraes 2006) species. Such evidence suggests that ethnocentrism may be rooted in biological evolution, and that its essential cognitive component is quite simple: the ability to distinguish in- vs. out-group members and select different behaviors based on that distinction. A striking example from red fire ants is that queens without a particular gene are detected and killed at birth by worker ants (Keller & Ross 1998). (...)

When it comes to your next question:

Is this the culture war? Who is winning the culture war?

According to Hartshorn et al., the most successful cultures are ethnocentric and humanitarian ones.

In computer simulations, ethnocentrism is usually winning:

Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates.

(...)

Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies.

Ethnocentrism dominates the world in 73-75% of all simulations, while humanitarianism comes 2nd, winning 15-17% of simulations:

average proportions of the four strategies during the last 100 of 2000 evolutionary cycles were .08 selfish, .02 traitorous, .75 ethnocentric, and .15 humanitarian (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b). Systematic doubling and halving of key parameters (e.g., lattice size, number of cycles, number of tags, cost of cooperation) did not alter this distribution much, suggesting that evolution of ethnocentrism is not a knife-edge phenomenon but is instead quite robust.

(...)

Mean evolving strategy frequencies over the 50 worlds are plotted in Figure 1. These plots indicate that ethnocentric dominance occurs, on average, at around 300 evolutionary cycles. Until that point, there is strong competition from humanitarians. Both selfish and traitorous strategies increase over the first 300 cycles but then stagnate at such low levels that they never pose much of a threat to either humanitarianism or ethnocentrism. A plot of evolving population sizes in 50 worlds, in Figure 2 left-side Y-axis, indicates that world population saturates at around that same time, 300 cycles. The right-side Y-axis in Figure 2 shows that the proportion of out-group interactions, averaged over 50 worlds in a fresh simulation, increases across the first 300 evolutionary cycles and then stagnates at just under .2. Proportion of out-group interactions is computed as the number of out-group interactions divided by number of total interactions (out-group interactions + in-group interactions). In summary, as the world fills up, out-group interactions reach a maximum and final decisive splits in strategy frequencies emerge. Similar to earlier results (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b), the mean proportions of strategies at 1000 cycles are .08 selfish, .02 traitorous, .73 ethnocentric, and .17 humanitarian.

Figure 1. Mean evolving strategy frequencies in 50 worlds ± SE:

(...)

Even if humanitarianism becomes dominant at some point, ethnocentrism is capable of regaining its ground in many simulations:

Figure 7 shows an example with a strong early stage of humanitarian dominance, eventually giving way to ethnocentric dominance. The chi-square tests for this world reveal significant humanitarian dominance between cycles 111 and 350, followed by significant ethnocentric dominance from cycle 425. Sixteen of the 50 worlds showed this general pattern:

Figure 7. Strategy frequencies in World 3, showing early humanitarian dominance:

Some hypotheses as to why ethnocentrism wins in most of simulations:

Hypotheses for Explaining Ethnocentric Dominance

In explaining eventual ethnocentric dominance, Hammond and Axelrod (Hammond & Axelrod 2006a, 2006b) focus on the ability of ethnocentrics to out-compete free-riders in neighboring clusters. They defined a free-rider as a selfish agent who benefits from the cooperation of others while defecting and thus incurring no cost to itself. Hammond and Axelrod illustrate the dynamics of ethnocentric dominance over selfish free-riders by imagining a cluster of selfish agents near a differently tagged cluster of ethnocentric agents. These two clusters compete for neighboring free space. Although neither cluster cooperates across group lines, agents within the ethnocentric cluster benefit more from the cooperation of fellow members than do agents within the selfish cluster. Agents from the ethnocentric cluster have higher net RP, and thus are more likely to win the competition for space by placing more offspring in it.

This ability to out-compete free-riders would presumably be undermined if the ethnocentrics in this example were replaced by humanitarians, because humanitarians cooperate across group boundaries. Indeed, in a simulation consisting of only humanitarian and selfish agents, group distinctions are trivial because they do not affect cooperative behavior; humanitarians cooperate with everyone, and selfish agents cooperate with no one. Thus, unlike ethnocentrics, humanitarians seem to lack a mechanism for defeating free-riders. If ethnocentrics out-compete free-riders better than humanitarians do, this could explain why ethnocentrics eventually dominate over humanitarians. We can term this the mediation hypothesis because it holds that interactions with selfish free-riders mediate the outcome of ethnocentric-humanitarian competition.

Alternatively, one might focus on the dynamics of direct competition between humanitarian and ethnocentric clusters. As suggested by both previous results (Hammond & Axelrod 2006b) and present results, the chief competitor for ethnocentrism is humanitarianism rather than selfishness. Ethnocentrics of one cluster exploit humanitarians of another cluster, benefiting from the latter's cooperation while donating nothing in return. There are thus two candidate hypotheses to explain eventual ethnocentric dominance: the mediation hypothesis that ethnocentrics out-compete free-riders more effectively than humanitarians do, and the direct hypothesis that ethnocentrics exploit humanitarians across cluster frontiers.

We test these two hypotheses in Studies 1 and 2.

(...)

This is probably why right-wing parties will not go away any time soon.

But there is hope for the left, a mutation called Williams Syndrome, which causes individuals to have no ethnic biases:

Robin Nixon 2010, "Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases":

http://www.livescience.com/8189-individuals-rare-disorder-racial-biases.html

Never has a human population been found that has no racial stereotypes. Not in other cultures or far-flung countries. Nor among tiny tots or people with various psychological conditions.

Until now.

Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases. They do, however, traffic in gender stereotypes, said study researcher Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

(...)

Due to the present study, we now know that "gender and race are processed by different brain mechanisms," Meyer-Lindenberg said, although those involved in gender are less understood.

Previous work has shown that in the brains of people with Williams syndrome, the amygdala — the emotional seat of the brain — fails to respond to social threats. While the amygdala itself is functionally normal, it is misguided by the pre-frontal cortex — the executive of the brain — to block all social anxiety.

This system is now thought to underlie racism, but it seems uninvolved in the formation of sex stereotypes.

Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues are now using brain imaging to get a clearer picture of how racism and sexism are differentiated in the brain. The present study was published in the journal Current Biology.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Maybe I've been away for too long, but Off-Topic used to be a lot more right and a lot less left-contrarian.

Left-contrarian?

Earlier you said Scandinavia wad supposedly a model for social democracy and neoliberalism. Aren't those contradicting?

This might not be a well thought out idea, but:
While fascist resurgence might be the largest threat against modern western democracy, it's not a big problem. Modern western democracy is a (neo) liberal institution, and it sits very comfortably. Many people no longer think there are alternatives, and that this is the end goal.

Personally I'd prefer socialism, but I don't know how that can be brought about.

 

[Formaldehyde]

My suggested answer to your question is: human biological and social evolution.

Welcome to the forum.

That provides a compelling argument for ethnocentrism. But what does it have to do with right-wing parties becoming far more right-wing and authoritarian than before, instead of explain why ethnic groups frequently intermarry, like to live in their own communities, and are xenophobic to some extent?

In the US this movement is is fueled by fundamental Christianity, especially evangelism, which is spread over a number of ethnic groups. They banded together under Reagan to be able to wield more political power, but they are still separate groups from widely different backgrounds. Religion is also on the decline, especially fundamentalism, and it will eventually disappear nearly altogether.

Yet even in Western Europe where there is already little fundamental Christianity anymore, the trend also seems to be true.

 

[Narz]

Interesting first post PicturesquePict. Welcome to the boards.

 

[CELTICEMPIRE]

I'm not sure how the Tea Party is "Fascist."