this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Canβt protect democracy if the electorate is idiots.
The electorate has been systematically driven into the arms of of those people by both the political establishment and the media for decades.
The political establishment has contended itself with turning austerity into some kind of state religion and administrating the resulting shortages. Whenever this has lead to discontent, they were happy enough to jump on the far right's bandwagon and adopted their talking points because they deluded themselves that they could get back lost votes this way, rather than admitting that they had caused the problems themselves and even trying to rectify them. The media have happily been helping this process along by rarely questioning the never ending austerity at the expense of the middle and lower classes, while parroting every single far right talking point. Now we're reaping what has been sowed in the past decades.
That the far right makes disproportional gains in the East is no surprise, as the East, especially its rural regions, has been systematically sold out and run down even further than under the GDR since reunification.
I think there have been studies that showed people vote for the AfD because they are racists and fascists and not because they're somehow left behind or don't feel included. However, I do think racism is driven up by our current capitalist society where we have to fight for the scraps the billionaire class deems sufficient for us. This makes it much easier to hate every foreign person, because you feel there will be even less scraps left for you.
Actually Piketty writes about this in his book "capital and ideology". The left has been slowly losing support in the lower education classes which traditionally voted left, this has apparently been going on since the 1960s/70s. They either went to conservatives or stopped voting. Now that there is a new party that claims to actually listen to their concerns (even if they won't actually solve any of these concerns) causes them to flock to that party. They have been disappointed by everyone in the political system and the populists are using this to their advantage.
The left, for the most part, has also shifted away from traditional working class leftism towards a bizarre kind of ivory tower leftism catering to a relatively small bubble of people in higher education and is tearing itself apart with perpetual infighting over ridiculous and inconsequential things.
This new left has little to nothing to offer for the working class. If you ever heard them speak or tried to read their pamphlets, you might wonder whether they are actually reaching the working class at all, because the works of this new left tend to be infuriatingly tedious to listen to and/or read and are very capable of giving anyone a mighty headache. Additionally, the centre left has gone full neoliberal, as /u/LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee already said here. This might account for a lot of the people who gave up on voting. (Ever wondered why the SPD keeps scoring worse and worse every election? They abandoned the notion of being a working class party, and people are finally catching onto it)
Yep that's why the left is losing voters. This is, somewhat funnily, a result of them being partly successful. One of their main programs they actually achieved back then was to make education more accessible to the lower classes. While the education systems still have a lot of flaws, they are more egalitarian than they used to be. Percentages of people with higher education have exploded. (This is of course also driven by market demand and that's why the liberals supported these policies to an extent making them possible). With this they split their former voting group into academics and non-academics. But they source a lot more party-personelle from the academic portion which leads to a feedback-loop that favours the academics. Since academics tend to have higher incomes and sometimes accumulate a little wealth they'd like to keep, the left depending on these voters looks a lot like the parties that always wanted to protect higher incomes and wealth.
The ones that were left behind by that development are the ones that got turned away from the left.
The "market demand" is insane, the amount of bullshit jobs that can be done by a trained monkey but supposedly require a whole bunch of high level degrees for comparatively low pay is just ridiculous.
The entire "labour market" is broken and highly skewed in favour of corporations who can and will happily offload the training of their employees on the taxpayer while avoiding paying any taxes themselves wherever possible.
Yeah that's true. But the market demands it nonetheless and thus liberals are happy to use public funds to further corporate goals, even if it means that there is also some egalitarian aspect to it.