The throughline of fascism that’s been most resilient through modern day is the idea of class struggle being replaced by “workers should comply with owners against a common enemy”, and then that enemy is pretty replacable with the scare of the day.
Pit-in-the-stomach feeling reading the news today as the brownshirts in Sweden are gearing up to delay climate solutions even harder, through outright denial. This is a horror show since the other parties are already bad and insufficient at climate stuff. We definitively can’t afford to add a big old stinking Overton magnet in the opposite direction.
Politically, it makes perfect sense that they’re doing this: create a common enemy in “people who know climate change is real” and they can pretty directly link woes to that enemy.
Their rural politics spokesperson said: “People think that the fees and tariffs we’ve put on our backs break their lives to a too great extent” (lit “Människor tycker att pålagorna som vi tagit på oss slår sönder deras tillvaro i allt för hög utsträckning”).
No shit!
But that doesn’t make climate change less real 🤦🏻♀️
That’s why this is so fucked up. It would make perfect sense, this strategy, if it weren’t for the small little problem that there’s a climate crisis that’s killing everyone.
And lives do need to change.
Climate change is caused by unaccounted-for transaction externalities. That’s just facts. (Some of those tariffs properly would need to be infinite since there are singularities in the equation.)
Things are already subsidized. We’ve built all we’ve got on the false economy of fossils.
That also explains why the fascists never select climate threat itself as the scare of the day, why we see gasoline populist fascism to a much greater extent than eco-fascism: because fascism is about preserving the owner class’s wealth, and that’s incompatible with addressing climate change.
Which we’ve got to do.
Our past selves borrowed from our future selves but now we can’t figure out a way to kick the can down the road even if we wanted to.
And I know that for some of us all we’ve got is crumbs and cardboard. We have an ever-increasing wealth gap, a wealth gap that this party’s policies has widened. Lives at the top should be changing even more. We can’t have burgers and cars and we sure as heckfire can’t have no private jets.
This same party wants to rapidly increase military spending by 54%, by the way.