General Discussion

but even the Nazis didn't start out to be the Nazis, they were a populist movement that began because the economy had gone completely to hell. They were taken over by a bunch of right wing grifters who found a charismatic maniac for them all to rally aroun.

So it was with the Tea Party, remember them? They had a point about taxes on middle and working class people being far too high in comparison to taxes on the sainted rich but they were soon taken over by charismatic grifters like Breitbart and Bannon.

And so it goes, whenever people in the middle and/or bottom start to organize, there are always extreme right wing opportunists who slither out from under their rocks to give them leadership...which quickly turns into dictatorship of the ones who don't sour on the whole thing and sink back into apathy.

I suppose this is partially provoked by a recent book I've read, a rather flattering bio of Macron. Early on, he decided to raise the gasoline tax as a way of encouraging people to convert to electric cars. The problem was that a lot of French people still live in villages and that tax increase left them struggling to fill their gas tanks to get to work. They put on their yellow safety vests and stood at roundabouts protesting what they knew to be an unfair tax. Well, the movement grew and eventually LePen saw an opportunity and her thugs coopted it and turned it into a violent and virulently anti Semitic movement that the government had one hell of a time dealing with, even after the misguided gas tax had long since been repealed.

Other populist movements have popped up in Europe, more as a result of onerous taxes or a soured economy than any influx of refugees, but as soon as the winers have come out, the movements have become nationalist, anti immigrant and nasty and all have forgotten their original purpose.

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time. I don't know what we can do to prevent these nasty sons of bitches from taking over even benign movements with limited scope. I think we'd better figure it out soon.