Comment by lyu07282
Putting the "interests of their nation and the citizens of that nation" first is the meaningless populist rhetoric part, that always appeals in a racist, bigoted populous (so every nation ever pretty much). That's like people suffer economically from neoliberalism, so you redirect to unrelated scapegoats, that's trivial, happened a million times.
Historically the fascist then, will use economic populist policy. That's like when Hitler built the Autobahn, you alleviate the economic grievances, support for the autocrat cements and then the real fascist stuff begins, that's when term limits go away and their enemies go in the oven.
But they don't do that economic populist part do they? These new right-wing movements in the west aren't doing this part of the equation.
Because we are now in the "interesting", novel case where the autocrats themselves are also just more neoliberals, the real power hasn't really moved an inch, like they are all paid by the same set of oligarchs, power is already fully consolidated. So I suspect nothing much will happen, it will just swing back to the center that shifted the overton window a bit more to the right in the meantime, the status quo didn't change so people are perpetually unhappy with no idea why.
> I feel politics is like this perpetual motion machine where you reach some absolute extreme on end
Yeah man! Totally! It's like when we move from Reaganomics in the 80s to Clintonomics in the 90s, from one "absolute extreme end" to the other! TF
Contemporary issues have on novel nuance you aren't considering - globalism. Many political leaders, particularly in Western democracies today, are much more at home among other globalists than amongst their own people. And these people tend to be extremely unpopular. For instance Germany's Merz's approval rating is 30%, a rating France's Macron and his 17% approval rating would love. It's extremely dysfunctional.
In the past such unpopular leaders could never have been able to maintain power. So you have this weird dissonance growing where countries are ruled by people who don't particularly care for their country, and people who don't particularly care for their leaders. The 'populist' rhetoric isn't some veiled proxy for supremacy, but simply getting rid of this really weird state of affairs. The entire point of a representative democracy is for the people who lead to be representative. And in many countries around the world, that's no longer the case.
I would take myself as an example of the problem. I am an advocate for free speech, against war/screwing around in other countries/military industrial complex, against political correctness, and strongly support equality of opportunity. In other words I'm pretty much a textbook liberal of 20 years ago, yet these values leave me far closer to contemporary "conservative" populist parties, worldwide, than to liberal parties, again - worldwide.
I find many of the values that "liberal" parties espouse now a days are rather illiberal and extremely similar to conservative policies of some 20+ years ago. Censorship, war, deplatforming, political correctness, and so on. I think we may actually be living through a 'flip' akin to what happened in the early 20th century in the US.