Austerity Creates Fascism

java-man

Oh boy, we'll step on this rake again and again. It will get much much worse before we could make it better.

weirdmantis69

That's weird Canada had austerity in the 90s and we didn't get fascism.

dosinga

Austerity does not create fascism. The examples in the article are just all wrong. Even if you call Trump and Orban fascists, they did not follow austerity. The reaction to the financial crisis was the largest fiscal and monetary interventions in history. Orban consolidated power by spending and state expansion, not austerity. True austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal of recent times led to new parties, but those countries are politically doing surprisingly well.

ModernMech

I'm confused, is Cory under the impression that the fascism isn't already here? America is well underway on the that project. Frankly the fascism was plenty apparent after 9/11, when the Bush years entrenched a permanent security state through endless-war powers (AUMF), mass surveillance (Patriot Act/NSA spying), expansive detention and torture regimes (CIA black sites like Guantanamo), a huge domestic enforcement bureaucracy (DHS/ICE), and tax cuts that concentrated wealth upward, cuts to education and healthcare. These are the exact things the current-day fascists are using to choke us now. People are only upset today because it's affecting white folk more directly, when back then it was aimed at Muslims. We warned you all back then about this, we warned again in 2016, we warned again in 2024, and yet here we are, knee deep in fascism. Maybe we'll be neck deep soon but let's not pretend this is just starting or about to start because of AI.

stasmo

The US does not respond with austerity during a crisis, it responds with ever larger economic stimulus by printing money at the central bank. The next crisis will be no different. There is zero political appetite for austerity so it will not happen in the US.

josefritzishere

That is quite a sentence "...if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery"

burnt-resistor

Fascism's causes are many and situational; economic depression is one risk among many. "X causes Y" is too often an oversimplification most times, especially when lacking overwhelming quantitative supporting evidence.

throw0101a

See perhaps Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Blyth