this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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I think there have been studies that showed people vote for the AfD because they are racists and fascists and not because they're somehow left behind or don't feel included. However, I do think racism is driven up by our current capitalist society where we have to fight for the scraps the billionaire class deems sufficient for us. This makes it much easier to hate every foreign person, because you feel there will be even less scraps left for you.
People have been racists and fascists before the AfD, too. But there wasn't a political climate that allowed anyone to publicly support a fascist and/or racist party without instantly being ostracised. As a result, fascist and racist parties were getting relatively little positive publicity and their election results were so meager that an attempt to ban the NPD failed for the simple reason of them not posing a realistic threat to democracy.
The entire political spectrum shifting towards the right, and the media increasingly taking up the far right's talking points, giving them a platform and positive publicity has emboldened the fascists and racists who previously would rather vote something else than throwing their vote away for a party that's not going to make it anyway to vote for the AfD. The reaction of the political establishment has been, rather than opposing their rhetoric, adopting their talking points, to such an extent that recently an AfD politician publicly boasted how the AfD doesn't even need to be in government in order to make changes, because everyone is doing their bidding anyway.
That's a big problem indeed and a large part of the current political climate. And instead of offering an alternative to the rat race, all relevant political parties have embraced and furthered it. There is a big vacuum on the left side of the political spectrum, a lot of the supposedly "left" political parties are neoliberal capitalists through and through and contend themselves with feel good leftism for a very small bubble of privileged (pseudo) intellectuals. Most people don't give a shit about things like gendered language (or are annoyed by it), but would instead be very much interested in making ends meet and having a life worth living with their hard earned income. But there is little to no classic working class leftism left in the left end of the political spectrum, at least not with any relevant party.
Actually Piketty writes about this in his book "capital and ideology". The left has been slowly losing support in the lower education classes which traditionally voted left, this has apparently been going on since the 1960s/70s. They either went to conservatives or stopped voting. Now that there is a new party that claims to actually listen to their concerns (even if they won't actually solve any of these concerns) causes them to flock to that party. They have been disappointed by everyone in the political system and the populists are using this to their advantage.
The left, for the most part, has also shifted away from traditional working class leftism towards a bizarre kind of ivory tower leftism catering to a relatively small bubble of people in higher education and is tearing itself apart with perpetual infighting over ridiculous and inconsequential things.
This new left has little to nothing to offer for the working class. If you ever heard them speak or tried to read their pamphlets, you might wonder whether they are actually reaching the working class at all, because the works of this new left tend to be infuriatingly tedious to listen to and/or read and are very capable of giving anyone a mighty headache. Additionally, the centre left has gone full neoliberal, as /u/[email protected] already said here. This might account for a lot of the people who gave up on voting. (Ever wondered why the SPD keeps scoring worse and worse every election? They abandoned the notion of being a working class party, and people are finally catching onto it)
Yep that's why the left is losing voters. This is, somewhat funnily, a result of them being partly successful. One of their main programs they actually achieved back then was to make education more accessible to the lower classes. While the education systems still have a lot of flaws, they are more egalitarian than they used to be. Percentages of people with higher education have exploded. (This is of course also driven by market demand and that's why the liberals supported these policies to an extent making them possible). With this they split their former voting group into academics and non-academics. But they source a lot more party-personelle from the academic portion which leads to a feedback-loop that favours the academics. Since academics tend to have higher incomes and sometimes accumulate a little wealth they'd like to keep, the left depending on these voters looks a lot like the parties that always wanted to protect higher incomes and wealth.
The ones that were left behind by that development are the ones that got turned away from the left.
The "market demand" is insane, the amount of bullshit jobs that can be done by a trained monkey but supposedly require a whole bunch of high level degrees for comparatively low pay is just ridiculous.
The entire "labour market" is broken and highly skewed in favour of corporations who can and will happily offload the training of their employees on the taxpayer while avoiding paying any taxes themselves wherever possible.
Yeah that's true. But the market demands it nonetheless and thus liberals are happy to use public funds to further corporate goals, even if it means that there is also some egalitarian aspect to it.