second thought is a 100% viewer funded operation if you'd like to help support the channel and get some great perks while you're at it consider becoming a patron at [Music] now that it's been a few weeks though as we patiently wait for the central left to betray the Coalition and its program we should talk about what this election actually tells us about politics in Europe because it's not great with these electoral results we're seeing fascism reach a point in many European countries including France where it now has enough electoral and institutional power to start moving towards a more threatening stage here's what I mean for starters the NFP won the most seats as a coalition of multiple parties same goes for the presidential Coalition which is made up of five parties of its own those coalitions usually agree with each other especially those behind the president but the leftwing group is very Loosely aligned with no Undisputed leader holding it together and most parties regularly threatening to leave the group there's a good chance the Socialists will have already ditched the others by the time this video comes out the NFP also didn't get that many votes both the left and the center right got about 7 million votes each while Le Pen's far right was way ahead of both at 10 million and that's not all it took hundreds of candidates dropping out of the race for the left and the center right to play nice and prevent far-right candidates from turning that huge plurality into a total sweep this is a big difference from just two years ago when the RN only got about 4 million votes and when you look at how the party's grown since the 80s it's clearly made big strides these last few years and this isn't that different from what we're seeing in the rest of Europe the elections for the EU Parliament were also this summer and not only did the RN come out ahead there for France too by a wide margin at around 31% far-right parties everywhere made huge gains in Italy Germany Austria the Czech Republic and the Netherlands to name just a few so this sucks the rise of the far right means a much worse EU it means more institutional power for the far right and it also means that centrists now feel more comfortable copying their positions on things like immigration we're seeing policies like the migration pact Breeze through the EU a law that's going to do a lot of the same things we have here in the US at the southern border immigrant adults and children are going to be detained some for up to 6 months Asylum Seekers will have to endure much worse conditions upon entry and nothing is going to be done to assist those who make the dangerous often deadly trip across the Mediterranean and just while we're on the topic I need to remind some viewers that immigration is not a bad thing like in any way this is always true but it's particularly relevant now just as we were about to record this video we started seeing this in the news anti-immigration rioter attack a hotel in rotheram police officers coming under attack from a farri right Mall in early August all across the UK we saw far-right lynch mobs descend on mosques and hotels housing Asylum Seekers setting them on fire and doing everything they could to break in surging on a wave of disinformation crowds of hundreds all over the country have gathered to attack and intimidate anyone they perceive to be a foreigner in some cases seemingly with the intent to kill or at least seriously injure their targets an Asian man was pulled out of his car and watched it be absolutely destroyed a black man was beaten by a mob of white men and we've heard reports of Muslim girls getting spat on and getting their hijabs forcibly removed this is terrifying and disgusting and it's based on nothing the whole narrative about protecting countries from immigrants that motivates both these sorts of attacks and anti-immigrant policies in general is based on nothing immigration is a good thing just as one example here's a paper from the NBR published this year that shows that immigration increases both wages and employment for Native workers at all education levels they're not taking your job they're also putting more money into things like Social Security than they take out this by the way means immigrants are almost always living in very precarious situations so there's that too immigrants also commit far fewer crimes than native born people per capita and all of that doesn't even touch on all the day-to-day benefits of immigrants contributing all sorts of great things to a country's culture but anyway back to the far right in the EU on top of the immigration fear mongering more far-right members also means climate change policies getting weaker more military spending and cuts to health care if you follow this stuff you might have heard about Patriots for Europe it's a new group launched this summer in the EU Parliament after the farri gained a bunch of seats and I know this isn't the point of the video I just I want to talk about their website for a second because this just look at this their logo their logo is three butt plugs first of all let's see what else we got here they have a child hugging a small bear of course watch out for the children plastic bags over immigrants that's wholesome why is every picture Choice somehow entirely predictable and unhinged at the same time all right what do we have sovereignty here okay what's going on here cuz if I click the sovereignty Arrow it brings me it opens my email to send the anyway doesn't matter go check it out on your own time it is truly something this website is full of the Farr's usual dog whistles reducing tax burdens for the the middle class means cut taxes for the rich and leave the working class to rot preserving European culture and identity means no brown people please and of course protecting Christian values and the traditional family model means o gays and if you have any doubts that this is what they're saying one open your eyes all these parties have rejected proposals to raise the minimum wage have worked to increase violence at border crossings and regularly stop LGBT people from gaining equal rights whether that's marriage equality or adoption two take the effect it has on stochastic terrorism back in June for example a group of far-right supporters in Paris attacked a man called him quote a filthy eer and said quote you'll see when bardel is in power and Hitler comes back hey are are these guys fascist maybe what is fascism well that's not so easy to answer there are tons of different definitions of fascism there's Alberto ekko's 14 points in ER fascism Jason Stanley's 10 points in how fascism Works Robert Paxton's definition in the anatomy of fascism and if you followed this channel for a while you've probably heard me use Roger Griffin's definition from the nature of fascism but all these definitions are roughly similar and they all exist because we're not going to see fascism come back looking exactly like it did under Hitler or musolini you can't wait until people start throwing up Nazi salutes that's just not going to [Music] happen ignore that of all these definitions I think Robert Paxton's is one of the clearest for Paxton fascism is distinct from other authoritarian politics because it's one obsessed with this idea of national decline I.E things are worse for our people now than they used to be two it depends on a large group of people who not only believe this but also believe that being from their Nation SLC country makes them better or more deserving than those who quote don't belong who they think are to blame for this decline three this group wants to preserve or in their mind bring back their status in the hierarchy above whoever else these Outsiders are and four they're prepared to achieve that through indiscriminate violence or both legal and extra-legal means with or without the help of traditional Elites everything else branches off from these core components this all makes fascism a very flexible ideology at its core there's not much more to it than things used to be better don't ask me when or why it just was it's the fault of those lesser people that everything sucks now this flexibility is why fascists often change their minds on on this or that random policy don't always agree and aren't always expressing the same bigotry depending on their National context when you start from this anxiety that the root of all problems comes from an outside group it doesn't matter so much what your climate policy is for example unless you can use it to play up the idea that other countries are winning or roll it up into a plot against the same anxious middle class it's also why every fascist project has some version of a weak anti-c capitalist message targeting a declining middle class to gain power fascists often attack very vaguely or racially defined Elites hijacking people's real concerns about inflation or welfare Cuts but pinning them on some group of Bad actors instead of people just following the regular incentives of capitalism in practice that means that quote whenever fascist parties acquired power however they did nothing to carry out these anti-capitalist threats instead quote once in power fascist regimes ban strikes dissolved independent labor unions lowered wage earners purchasing power and showered money on armaments Industries to the immense satisfaction of employers it's why quote 20 years of fascism in Italy took workers more than 30 years back pushing wages way down and time and time again favoring the wealth of the top 1% at the expense of the bottom 99 so how did we get here in this moment where these Ultra nationalist parties are poisoning the political landscape NE ISM around the 80s and 9s both the so-called left and the right adopted basically the same economic program growth at any cost every politician dutifully followed the same plan sell off government assets to private companies cut welfare fight unions increase free trade and try to make Trickle down Economics work it doesn't inequality skyrockets and governments respond with mass incarceration campaigns but that's not enough to hold this system together you also need to sell all of these measures as various forms of Freedom the freedom to carve your own path as an entrepreneur free from all that big government red tape free to buy whatever kind of toothpaste you want they'll say the free market just knows best so the government should only be there to ensure good competitive business practices and that's it of course all of this is in theory in reality whatever the government does capitalism is always going to produce monopolies and corporations stealing your freedom under neoliberalism when you've gutted the public health system and sold it off sure you're free to choose between all these different insurance companies but in practice you don't feel very free when you can't actually afford any of them this idea of making things better through this competition of everyone against everyone in practice really means competition between workers for jobs that ultimately very few company monopolies it leads you down a path where in Margaret Thatcher's own words there's no such thing as Society just individuals trying their best to be part of the group that survives for David Harvey in this book this is the sort of Bedrock that fascism creeps out of when there's no solidarity left because the unions are gone the welfare state is sold off and unemployment is always looming over you Ultra nationalism can Thrive it responds to the chaos of capitalism by selling order order based on a traditional morality that's going to appeal to the chunk of people who used to be better off before before this system entered its current phase this way ultr nationalism ultimately keeps the institutions that actually drive people apart but papers over all that with the illusion that this unjust system can keep going if you can offload the problems onto those who just don't deserve to be safe or somehow compromise this ingroup's Unity by being different if someone needs to take the fall If there really is no economic alternative since both the left and the right seem to agree that growth is going to have casualties at least the farri is there to reassure its voters that they won't be the ones who suffer even though like we've seen in every fascist regime they absolutely do none of this by the way is helped by the fact that Centrist and center-right politicians have been super gung-ho about normalizing the sorts of politics we hear from the fascist right take macron over the last seven years not only is he personally invested in deepening the neoliberal project cutting welfare raising ing the retirement age pushing out unions and so on he's been one of the earliest adopters of the far rights talking points in 2018 for example macron wanted to be the first president since World War II to honor the Nazi collaborator Philipe patan he's pushed for a law against separatism targeting Muslim organizations has echoed far-right talking points about France undergoing a decivilization process and referred to the country as an organic Nation a far-right idea that justifies policies like Hitler's Labon to give you an idea of how far this goes on one occasion his minister of the Interior France's Top Cop actually had trouble distinguishing the presidential party stance on immigration from the far rights in a debate and ended up calling her too soft on immigration this isn't good the reason fascism is so successful today is thanks to liberals like this nothing made this clearer than this election when macron dissolved Parliament at the peak of the far rights popularity fully expecting to saddle France with a fascist prime minister years of fueling resentment with declining material conditions and normal politicians confirming at every step of the way that the Nationalist logic of fascism is just as legitimate as any other form of politics has brought us here but this isn't an automatic process at every point we have people making decisions and choosing to either go down this path or resist it while we can see the Terri gains of the far right for what they are the preparations for a more powerful fascist movement at the helm of a major European power we can also see in these elections the solution to the fascist problem the solidarity of the left both within itself and with those brutalized by Decades of neoliberalism and don't misunderstand me here this isn't just an electoral problem we need to be organizing outside of Bourgeois Politics as well in fact that's way more important but that doesn't reduce the importance of slowing down fascism as much as possible on every front the left far-left Coalition has unexpectedly become the biggest party in the French Parliament beating the far right the left one this time not on a program of growth not by betraying unions not by reforming welfare and promising to throw more people in jail it won with a program to get rid of these last 40 Years of crushing austerity and it will again if it can turn the tide after years of the most brutal capitalism we've seen in a century if don't forget support for the Nazis peaked at 37% in 1932 that's where we are today what happens now is up in the air will we see a repeat of History where the fear of genuine socialist politics scares the ruling class into the hands of fascism or will a politics of radical solidarity against corporate power finally break the cycle we'll find out soon enough I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that this channel is entirely Grassroots funded since sponsors don't want to touch videos like these we have to rely on the generous support of viewers like you if you'd like to help keep this channel afloat and get some great perks while you're at it consider becoming a patron on patreon all patrons regardless of pledge amount 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