Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?

It's like we learned nothing from the 20th century: every time the rich get too greedy, they'll gleefully fertilize the fields of fascism before they'll accept making less money.

Without Paywall: https://archive.ph/0Ci0r

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Precisely because the Parliament is relatively weak, the election is closely watched as a measure of uninhibited popular sentiment, where voters register their discontent with potentially powerful downstream effects on national politics.

For France, it means that a party that is nationalist, xenophobic and Islamophobic may well emerge reinforced — accepted, legitimized and eminently electable to high office in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

The language of these parties may be less incandescent than former President Donald J. Trump’s invocations of “bloodshed,” but as they whip up support by scapegoating immigrants, and even move to lock in systems that could perpetuate their power, the threat to the postwar order seems real enough.

Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.

The working class, long the cornerstone of socialism in Europe, migrated en masse to the anti-immigrant right as an expression of frustration at growing inequality and stagnant paychecks.

For them, as for Mr. Putin, it has been easy to present a simplistic portrayal of the West of liberal urban elites as the decadent locus of cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die.

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