How Many Collapsing Societies Does It Take to Teach the Same Lesson?

The Worlds Dallying With Far Right Politics. But It Always Ends the Same Way.

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It’s a theme, that by now, should be hammered into everyone’s head. Not by me, but by history, reality, facts, logic, and evidence. We discussed it not so long ago. Everything the far right touches dies.

Today, we’re going to discuss it concrete, hard — and very recent — terms.

Beleaguered old Britain. There it is, collapsing. Hyperbole? Just literal reality. It was mere days ago that London’s water system…collapsed. The once vaunted NHS barely works. 40,000 — that’s not a typo — teachers quit last year. The economy’s in tatters, society’s fractured, pessimism and outright despair have set in — the average family’s experiencing the fastest fall in living standards in recorded history.

What happens when you let the lunatics and fanatics take power? This is what happens when you let the lunatics and fanatics take power. Now, everything I say here can also be applied to America, and I’ll come back to that shortly. And it matters for the rest of the world, too. Take nations like Italy, Sweden, Finland — who are all dallying, now, with far-right politics, to the point that Finland’s Finance Minister was found to have talked about “beating [N-word] kids.” In France and Germany, too, even in parts of Canada, the lunacy of the far right is rising. What’s the future of all that? This is a taste of that future. This is where it ends. Where it always ends.

You don’t have to think very hard why. Go back to Finland for a moment. If your finance minister is the kind of person who talks about “beating [N-word] kids” — and your economy minister’s the kind who thinks the solution to climate change is aborting African babies…and that’s all repellent enough…but what aren’t they going to actually be very good at? That’s right, running the economy, making sure things work, governing society.

Now let’s come to back to Britain. There are charts, and there are charts. Some are just summaries of everyday data, noise. But some teach us great truths of history. The chart above is one of those — and by the way, the one for America looks eerily similar. This chart shows us that everything the far right touches dies. In this case, that was Britain — one of the world’s most envied, beloved, and admired societies, wealthy, respected, powerful…and now there it is, a shattered shell, sliding fast into poverty and irrelevance. Here’s the chart again, so you don’t have to keep scrolling up. 

How did all this come to be? Just look at the chart. What does it show us? It’s basically debt. And the reason that people these days vote for the far right comes with two motives. They believe in the naive pop economics of austerity — and that itself is often motivated by prejudice: “I won’t pay for those dirty people’s kids, schools, educations, healthcare, housing! Why, they’re barely people at all!! Just parasites!!” 

Now, nobody likes seeing people around that don’t contribute to society — and it’s fine to air that complaint. But to then hand power to lunatics, and make a society’s only real priority…the combination of ethnic purification and austerity? Bad, bad news. A grievous, foolish, historic mistake. One that destroyed Britain in less than a generation, just a decade or so.

So. The chart above. It shows us that there was a financial crisis, and debt rose. Now, that itself shouldn’t have happened — the bad debts of banks should have been the responsibility of shareholders, wiping them out, not taken onto the public books. Still, even then, there were answers, like nationalizing banks, and then writing off the bad debt. 

For now, though, public debt rose — and that catapulted a conservative government into power, on the myth that now people needed to “tighten their belts.” Note the bizarre paradox here: nobody likes bank bailouts, the average Joe thinks they’re wrong, not must morally, but also logically, and yet, the next step — “we’ve got to tighten our belts now!” — they seem to fall for it every single time. 

This is what happened in Britain. The conservative party rose to power, promising the two words that strike dread into the heart of every thinking person: “fiscal responsibility.”

Again, this applies in almost eerily exact parallel to America, too.