Everyone seems to find the most striking claim here
over the next decade, … that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships … is … the most likely overall outcome
pretty outlandish. That right-wing, nationalist, conservative parties might win power in a lot of places, seems a reasonable projection (though very far from assured); that they will all turn their countries into “fascist dictatorships” where “there are no meaningful elections” is the outlandish part. That would seem to require something like the Spanish civil war, but throughout Europe and North America, perhaps after a catastrophic collapse of NATO under Trump 2.0 - which might be Putin’s dream, and the nightmare of liberal-progressive Americans, but I wouldn’t bet on it ever happening.
I noticed one oddity among the references cited. There’s this graph about how populists “rarely lose power” peacefully. But if you add up “reached term limits” and “lost free and fair elections”, that’s actually larger than the other bars. And “still in office” doesn’t distinguish between those who have been in office for a year and those who have been there for 25 years.
Furthermore, if you look up who the Blair Institute regards as a populist (half way down this page), it’s an odd mixture—Indonesia’s Widodo, Israel’s Netanyahu, Japan’s Koizumi are there alongside the usual names from left and right. In the academic literature on populism, Koizumi has been described as a neoliberal populist, something I wouldn’t have thought possible—though once the combination is allowed, I can imagine someone trying to put Barack Obama in that category, or even Tony Blair himself. Perhaps it just goes to show that politics varies a lot across time and space, as well as demonstrating again the nebulousness of many political categories.
Everyone seems to find the most striking claim here
pretty outlandish. That right-wing, nationalist, conservative parties might win power in a lot of places, seems a reasonable projection (though very far from assured); that they will all turn their countries into “fascist dictatorships” where “there are no meaningful elections” is the outlandish part. That would seem to require something like the Spanish civil war, but throughout Europe and North America, perhaps after a catastrophic collapse of NATO under Trump 2.0 - which might be Putin’s dream, and the nightmare of liberal-progressive Americans, but I wouldn’t bet on it ever happening.
I noticed one oddity among the references cited. There’s this graph about how populists “rarely lose power” peacefully. But if you add up “reached term limits” and “lost free and fair elections”, that’s actually larger than the other bars. And “still in office” doesn’t distinguish between those who have been in office for a year and those who have been there for 25 years.
Furthermore, if you look up who the Blair Institute regards as a populist (half way down this page), it’s an odd mixture—Indonesia’s Widodo, Israel’s Netanyahu, Japan’s Koizumi are there alongside the usual names from left and right. In the academic literature on populism, Koizumi has been described as a neoliberal populist, something I wouldn’t have thought possible—though once the combination is allowed, I can imagine someone trying to put Barack Obama in that category, or even Tony Blair himself. Perhaps it just goes to show that politics varies a lot across time and space, as well as demonstrating again the nebulousness of many political categories.