Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: npub1zl8j5…apnyf I've developed my own theories on why the far right's strategy is ...

npub1zl8j5tfhnhmyyy438vkkmf8n8kfzueu9uwpn55yufslr7h7x4nrqzapnyf (npub1zl8…pnyf) I've developed my own theories on why the far right's strategy is so successful, but I've got no solutions at hand other than imitating their strategies and exploiting the same socio-psychological mechanisms - which I really refuse of doing because I really care about ideological integrity.

First, there's the mountain-of-shit hypothesis. Trump, Wilders and Salvini have all been pioneers of this strategy. No matter how much ideological crap with no foundations in reality you throw out there: you'll always win if you can put out crap at a faster rate than your political opponents can clean it up. Usually an objective analysis of migration flows and their root causes, and the actual impacts of migration on rich economies (including their benefits), as well as a deep analysis of the opponent's ideology, require lengthy and brainy discourse. It's much easier to shout "kut marokkan" instead, blame commies, Africans or Mexicans for all the problems, and if somebody disproves your shaky platform just move on to the next moving target. Voters have a short memory anyway, and if you keep them constantly angry they won't even remember the previous enemy that you threw into your daily "two minutes hate" sessions. This is textbook Orwell: today's voters will be angry at Eurasia, tomorrow they'll be angry at Eastasia, and they'll even forget who they were angry at yesterday. And, on the other hand, nobody will remember the brainy progressive candidate who put enough effort to disprove the conspiracy on Jews, Mexicans, Muslims or "academic elites" that the fascist scum threw out there with total impunity and no sense of political responsiblity.

Second, keep blaming your political opponents even when it's you the one who's actually in power. Keep using the political language of the opposition even when you have the majority. Of course throwing Maroccans, Mexicans or highly-skilled migrants out of the country, or threatening academic discourse, or banning the Quran and preventing abortions won't fix homelessness, nor low wages, nor incentivise more people to have kids. At that point, you can say that if things aren't working yet it's just because of your political opponents jeopardizing your plans. Fascists never take responsibility for anything.

Third, avoid any kind of interactions that is based on objective data points. When a fascist is challenged with data points, he'll obviously lose badly. Whenever somebody throws numbers or evidence at you, or forces you to abide to the scientific method, leverage whataboutism to keep the focus at all costs on your core topics. Wilders won because he kept banging on migration at every single debate, whether the topic was the housing crisis, the climate crisis or the cost-of-living crisis. Eventually, he forced all the candidates to come into his field and talk about migration, and he beated all of them with experience.

Fourth, your ideological platform should always target simple emotions. It should never ask people to stop and think. Always target the amygdala, never the pre-frontal cortex. Always try and trigger releases of oxytocin in voters through the us-vs-them rheroric. Always create a sense of urgency and impending threat over the voters' lifestyle: that's the best way of getting even the most apathetic voter to come out and cast their vote, because today's elections are mostly won by whoever uses this technique to target the undecided and the apathetic.

Overall, the strategy is so obvious once one stops for a moment and sees the patterns in multiple elections.

But all the solutions that come to my mind are neither pretty nor something I'd be proud of as a politician.

We could try and replicate their strategy and rhetoric, make political programs that are founded on defeating the fascist enemy rather than solving any other problems at hand, keep banging the drum on an impending doom caused by these fascist pipers rather than talking of people's actual problems. That would suck.

Or we could try and outright ban these parties, but their fascist ideological platform isn't always so evident, so such an action may trigger a backlash under the form of anti-democratic accusation.

Or we could probably emulate the Australian system, where rather than casting a vote for a single party/coalition voters have to rank all the available options (that really helps solve the polarization problem), and voting is actually mandatory for all citizens, and failure to cast a vote without a justification is often met with fines: that would help solve the "sense-of-urgency" strategy that the far right uses to pull undecided voters who wouldn't vote otherwise.