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Notes -
Nick Fuentes just tweeted this, surprised no discussion here (too much arguing about fascism?)
He was a very hot topic here a month or two ago, curious how our right leaning friends here are feeling about him/his thoughts as the ongoing right-wing divorce over Israel et al continues. I actually thought the right wing infighting a ~month ago had died down, but maybe it's coming back?
I think partially he's just engagement farming, but he was pretty explicit/firm in his views on his stream too. I'm not familiar enough with him to know how much he flip-flops on strong statements he makes a few days/weeks/months later.
I feel like he had a brief chance to become someone really significant, adding his followers to the general Republican coalition. He would never be able to control the Republican party, but they would have listened to him. Instead, he threw it all away for some sort of purity test, like many extremists do. He'll have no influence at all, and it's not even clear what he wants. He reminds me of Jon Stewart- very funny as a comedian, but not much of a serious thinker.
I also think he relied on 4chan /pol/ memes to do a lot of the lifting for him in generating ideas, but 4chan is kinda dead these days, which killed his best source of material.
Purity test as in not doing a massive regime change war in Iran?
What is the limit? How low can the republicans sink while the base stays loyal? Americans should do what the British are doing by abandoning the torries en mass
This current situation still appears better than the previous baseline.
I would disagree. The UK can afford that better than we can because they are not as polarized; their current situation is a conflict within the local Blue Tribe analogue, with no significant Red Tribe to speak of. This lowers the pressure significantly, and allows maneuvers that are probably not survivable in our context.
I don't think that's fair. The European Red Tribe isn't going to look the same as the American one, and while the hard right has it's gripes with Farage, they aren't that different from the American hard right's gripes with the Republicans. On top of that, there's Lowe, who might not be polling high, but ir doesn't seem fair to call him insignificant.
That said, I think you're right about the "can afford" bit starting a new party in Europe, even in a first past the post system like the UK's, seems to be doable with a lot less friction than in a giant country like the US.
To give two examples, it doesn't seem to me that there's a European analogue to the Christian Right or to Gun Culture in terms of relatively-large, cohesive and politically-powerful subcultures. It seems to me that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a distinct, cohesive, organized Red Tribe is the reason America is such an outlier politically from the European political scene. On the other hand, it means polarization and thus tribal conflict gets much worse, because legible structure makes coordinating large-scale, serious meanness much easier. And in America, the coordinated meanness is much further along the escalation spiral: we're actually trying to do mass deportations now, and Blues are actually coordinating terrorism to fight back against those efforts.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor. This is a risky bet, but the risk seems rational and acceptable to me, given their situation. However, a dominant variable in that calculation is that they don't really have much of a choice, because they have no legible path to victory other than that provided by electoral politics.
In America, by contrast, I'm willing to accept the left's electoral victory, for certain definitions of "accept" that do not preclude their leaders and agents being murdered by people on my side, in much the way they have been willing to "accept" my electoral wins, modulo murders of my leaders and agents by people on their side. That doesn't change the fact that if such murders happen to them, they are not going to accept it as I have, and instead are going to escalate to the limits of their capability, or the fact that I will support unlimited escalation in return. Electoral Politics is still plan A in both the European and American contexts, but American politics has a legible plan B, and both tribes having been in a degenerate orbit toward it for at least a decade now.
I now realize I started to type too soon. This is a response to what I thought you wrote for a moment, but didn't really write. Posting anyway.
Does the UK right imagine themselves as patiently waiting, playing politics while the electorate learns the correct lessons? They don't give off an appearance of being that serious or prepared to me.
I know these polls are volatile -- more like (dis)approval polls of the current boss than anything else -- but stakes are potentially very high. "Treat all migrants as if they are citizens", enfranchise all residents with the right to vote, and accepting "responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move" are all things that would freak me out. If I read them on an official party platform and saw that party gain steam I'd think it's time to get serious about winning power. Among the numerous plans to stamp out out the last vestiges of industry and productivity there's also the casual pledges to do things like implement all "the reforms proposed" in a 2000 page report. This appears like a 15 year old legacy talking point, but it could also be the most popular pathway to smuggle in more media control.
I do not know too much about UK politics. There may be many good reasons to suspect the Greens will remain marginalized in politics and won't rub off on their failing Labour brethren-- at least not in consequential ways. If there's even a few reasons to take the rise of the Greens seriously, then the prospect of not-racist vote coalescing to empower the pack as many lefty gambits into platform, choose later party, even in limited form, that would scare the hell out of me. Expanding the franchise is already happening in a way that will favor whichever flavor of leftwardly one prefers. I wouldn't want to play chicken with any of this. Not unless I had immense trust in the system. That such a system would apply appropriate constraints until the voters are educated enough to reveal secret weapon Prime Minister Curtis Yarvin.
Yes, but keep in mind that it's not just about Greens overtaking Labour, it's also about Reform (Nigel Farage's party) overtaking the Tories. It's hard to frame that as "patiently waiting" IMO.
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