The Result of Austerity and Neo-Liberalism is the Rise of the Neo-Fascist Right

includes, as expected, the rise of the neo-fascist right. The UK Independence Party and France’s National Front won national elections to the European Parliament.

This doesn’t mean they would win national elections proper, the EU vote is often a protest vote, but the results are still impressive.

This the natural reaction to austerity. When times get tough, and when the “mainstream” parties have no answers which work, people will vote for alternatives. In Greece, to the Greek’s credit, this was SYRIZA, an actual left wing party (though the fascist Golden Dawn party did do reasonably well).

When I was a child, living in the city of Vancouver, I told my father I didn’t see a lot of racism. I’ve always remembered his response “wait till times get bad. People will hate those who are different.”

My father was a child of the Great Depression.

The neo-liberal left of Europe and North America offer no solutions. They cannot offer solutions, it is not possible under neo-liberalism to fix the problems neo-liberalism has created: they are a result of neo-liberalism’s genuine beliefs about how the world economy should be run.

You can not, under the neo-liberal model of globalization, tax the rich effectively: they can go somewhere else. You cannot hold wages up, because jurisdictions can always be played against each other. You cannot fix the environment and stop the mass wiping out of species and the probable death of a billion humans, because jurisdictions can be played against each other. That countries no longer produce the majority goods they need themselves, nor in many cases even the food, means jurisdictions cannot unilterally do the right thing, even if they wanted to (which they don’t.)

Because the oligarchs also control the means of ideological dissemination, you also can’t effectively communicate either the problems or good solutions. Because the oligarchs control the means of political production (ie. the process of producing and nominating political candidates), you can’t get into power the people who would actually want to change the neo-liberal political order (and if by some miracle you could, expect them to be treated as Argentina or Venezuela have been treated or destroyed as Howard Dean was.)

Neo-liberalism is an effective ideology and set of policy prescriptions: not because it produces good outcomes for the majority of people (that’s not its purpose), but because it creates a constituency (oligarchs and their supporters/retainers) who are able to maintain it in power.

All ideologies eventually come to an end, however. The oligarchs hate real left-wingism far more than they do fascism. They have crushed the left. Because no new coherent ideology can arise due to oligarchical control over the mechanisms of dissemination, all that remain are old ideologies.

Given no real and viable left-wing parties to vote for; given the failure of what they are told are left-wing policies (as with Obama being called a left-winger when his economic policy has been to give trillions to oligarchs); people will vote for the only other option: the hard right—the neo-fascists.

They are, at least, against the status quo. The UK-IP wants to leave the EU. They want less “free” trade. And so on. Given no other option for actual change, people opt for the parties actually offering it, even if those parties are noxious.

And so, the hard right rises because of the failure of the so-called center-left, which is not left wing at all, but is for more slightly less cruel neo-liberalism.

But neo-liberalism cannot be made kind. It is antithetical to one of the fundamental purpose sof neo-liberalism, which is to drive down wage rises and inflation by playing jurisdictions against each other.

And so the hard right rises.

Remember, the economies in Germany and Italy under Hitler and Mussolini, for ordinary people, improved immensely. (Unless you were a Jew, gay, a socialist, a gypsy, etc… But that’s a price those who won’t pay it, are willing to pay.)

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