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Additionally, the researchers found that life dissatisfaction indirectly influenced right-wing populist voting through two key attitudes: political distrust and anti-immigration sentiment. Dissatisfied individuals were more likely to distrust political institutions and view immigration negatively, which in turn increased their likelihood of voting for right-wing populist parties. Notably, anti-immigration sentiment emerged as the stronger of the two mediators.
And this is the key point of right-wing propaganda. Destroy trust into organizations, sow sentiments against immigrants, spread fear by overhyping individual crimes, produce anxiety. Basically “make people angry and fearful”.
Yeah, duh: making immigrants and politicians the scapegoat works best when people are unhappy with life.
To me it’s extremely transparent however that neoliberals and conservatives have defunded and weakened our institutions so they can no longer fulfill their responsibilities. This leads to dissatisfaction which the extreme right blames on immigrants and correctly on neoliberal politicians.
That this leads to women voting for patriarchs, Jewish people for descendants of Nazis and second generation immigrants for racists, is so frustrating.
And since the media - especially social media - is trapped in an attention economy where mainly bad news drive engagement it’s no wonder people have a skewed and negative view of reality.
Yup fear uncertainty and doubt has underpinned conservative messaging forever. The outgroup are after your stuff, watch out!
anti-immigration sentiment.
I wonder why indiginous wage slaves would feel this way… Like there is no way to tell why they would feel like this.
CBO estimated that net immigration was 2.67 million immigrants in 2022, and 3.3 million immigrants in 2023, the highest in its data going back to 2000, and about triple the average rate between 2000 and 2021 (1.05 million immigrants per year).
I wonder what happened in 2022 that made daddy bringing all these additional slaves.
Immigrants don’t need to be “brought.” This is right-wing rhetoric, but most ironic of all is that these “wage slaves” are literally better off with more immigration, not less.
I trust u bro
Unhappiness and fear linked to fascism? Unbelievable! But yeah, I think that’s something you more or less directly learn as German if you look back on our democracy, the Weimarer Republik, before rise of national socialism. Many people didn’t believed in democracy at the first place, but the bad economic situation made it even worse. If you are unhappy or even fear about your future that’s a great attack point for right wing propaganda.
I was thinking about this before scrolling comments. It seems many on the right support/vote for policies that actively make their quality of life seemingly better in the short term, and are surprised and disappointed when the long-term consequences of their decisions begin happening to become noticeable (usually more for me, less for thee?). When they discover the policies affect them, personally, they become angry and belligerent, looking to place blame on external factors. The left (I don’t mean neoliberal) seem to go within, asking things like, “how did my voting choices affect this? What have I learned? How can I calibrate my choices for better results, going forward?” then try to make better decisions, even if it hurts them more, personally, in the short term, hoping for better across-the-board results long term?
I’ve just begun milling this, so I’ve no idea if this is correct or not. I’d love to see some research on it.
All this learning what has it accomplished? The fascists are on the rise again.
The contemporary witnesses are dying. I wouldn’t say it’s because of them not being able to tell their stories anymore, but a human life is enough time for a society to forget. And if I say society, I really mean the majority of people forget, nowadays just many have forgotten, too many, but not the majority. There always have been a few people who couldn’t forget because they never knew, never wanted to know, we call them neo-nazis. They are on the rise again, all the crises of the last years have helped them and still do so, but I don’t think people who haven’t forgotten would follow them.
It works for both left and right wing populism. Unfortunately, the former tends to (almost always) manifest the latter. Just look at all left-wing populists who (understandably) hate Joe Biden rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump.
As a left wing populist, I do hate Joe Biden rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump
Sure, either interpretation works.
Justifiable hatred of the establishment undermines institutions beyond repair, and since left wing politics are grounded in facts, whereas populism is not a fact-based ideology, left wing populism almost always fails, and populism has become practically synonymous with fascism.
Incidentally, this is also why the left-wing has a tendency for infighting. Again, left-wing politics are broadly driven by facts whereas populism is not. The right wing flourishes under these conditions because none of their beliefs are grounded in empirical or normative reality.
Nothing learned from last time, huh?
Shit’s fucked, yo. So let’s vote for the kind of people that make everything worse. I will never understand this kind of mindset.
Especially since the populists thrive on it which gives them exactly zero incentive to improve things.
Some people need an answer that’s easy and quick. That answer is also always wrong but by then they stopped thinking anyway and are hooked on easy and quick.
“The rich stole all your money” is also an easy answer and much closer to reality. People who fall for right wing bullshit do so because it panders to their hate and resentment.
similarly, conspiracy cranks get all up in arms about some shady group of “elites” that somehow aren’t just… billionaires and top-level politicians…
they have an actual legitimate conspiracy in front of them, presented on a fucking silver platter, and yet they completely ignore that and instead make shit up that makes no fucking sense.
People voting for populists are much more likely to see the scapegoats their electees talk about in their life than an actual billionaire that exploited them, though. And there’s the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” narrative we’ve been forced upon, too.
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And why are they so concerned about something that is, despite the obvious problems, a net positive for any developed society?
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All the available empirical evidence that people like you so studiously ignore.
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So, less left politics lead to more right politics? Checks out in Germany. 16 years of Merkel and before that 16 years of Kohl have lead to crumbling infrastructure, an erosion of social welfare and tax breaks for the rich. And even our supposedly center left party hasn’t done much to change that when they were in power.
Damn we got a German using critical thinking…
Online they are always frothing at the mouth at negative mention of Merkel and her shiti economic and geopolitical policy
Has the public opinion turned on her within Germany yet or we still calling her auntie?
The rise of right-wing in Europe can be directly attributed to the massive influx of right-wing conservative ideologues from the middle East pouring in.
I’m a huge proponent of immigration, but what we’re seeing here is the backlash of immigration done incredibly poorly.
There will be articles for years that tap dance around with us, but if you listen to the people who are voting for right-wing assholes, it’s pretty clear why they’re doing it and what they’re saying. The Press has been bullied into avoiding talking about it though under the guise of islamophobia.
The rise of right-wing in Europe can be directly attributed to the massive influx of right-wing conservative ideologues from the middle East pouring in.
You might want to think on this some more, because this seems like a bad take to say the least. The people coming from the Middle East to the EU are very diverse. In fact, it’s a big pull that there’s a lot more freedom here than in their home countries. Including the freedom to e.g. be openly gay.
Our societies have (largely informally) been segregating immigrants from the native-born citizens. We also didn’t prioritize education about e.g. Islam. This void has been abused by organizations sponsored by autocratic nations to infiltrate or societies. That’s one part of the issue.
Another is that xenophobia is privileged in all of our brains. And a third is that over the past few decades, our societies were reshuffled to make outcomes worse for poor people.
I completely disagree is a bad take. I think you’re overlooking the reality that a right leaning Neo-Nazi has a lot in common with a conservative islamist.
You see it very clearly in Canada with the push to keep sex education out of classrooms being led by the far right PPC party and huge swaths of recently immigrated people from the middle East and Indian subcontinent. They use different methods but they have the same goals ultimately.
While I don’t disagree, it is possible that populism is exacerbated both by misery and by potentially legitimate anti-immigration sentiments.
I honestly think that no matter what we’re doing the right would have a problem with migration because they want to go back to a white supremacist kind of society. We’re hearing the same shit how about Syrians and Ukrainians now that we heard in the 90s about Russian and Yugoslavian people, in the 60s/70s about Italian, Spanish, Polish, Turkish people and in the 40s/50s about German refugees.
I’d disagree with that. For 50 years Canada did pretty well letting in controlled numbers of people from around the world. Then they opened the flood gates and problems started.
I’m not sure it’s about being black and white, i feel like it’s more about people feeling the need to integrate which doesn’t happen when you arrive with 100,000 of your countrymates.
If we need a behavioral science paper to understand such an elementary thing, really we have lost as a society.
The idea behind such papers is to put actual proof behind “Duh, that’s obvious.” That is never a bad thing.
Researching why large parts of the population have been marginalized and denied access to improved life conditions (thus avoiding the skyrocketing dissent these alt-right movements are embodying) and/or improve the education system so that people gain “immunity” to plot theories some propaganda is making use of would have been a better way to spend time imho.
Why couldn’t they just have been from the left.
The papier doesn’t go as far as exploring the reasons for personal life dissatisfaction. My theory is that much of it comes from the frustration created by advertising and consumerism. I can’t buy the same nice car/house/vacation as my neighbors/friends/relatives and so I get frustrated. People are constantly exposed to advertisement: in the morning when they check their phone or listen to the radio, during their commute with the radio again, billboards, bus stops, during the day every time they go on the Internet, during their commute back home, TV of course and again their phone at night. The influx of frustrating stimuli is constant throughout our lives, hence the dissatisfaction.
“I’m unhappy, let’s put people in camps and start a secret police force!! That’ll make me SO happy!”
“As long as someone else is getting hurt more than me!”
- every conservative
Don’t get too excited guys. It’s psypost…
Bad source?