No Stupid Questions

Indeed. It happened in Germany in the 30s. It lasted until the country was utterly destroyed and tens of millions of people were killed.

I think last time this happened a bunch of anti media consolidation laws were passed to prevent rich people from owning everything (unfortunately they were repealed in the 90s in the US) Also taxes, wars. Basically rich people will fund wars to ensure people don't take their money but in doing so they destroy their money because wars kill workers, destroy products and produce nothing of value.

Its easier just to tax rich people and break up the large conglomorates they're using to rig everything. Tech companies would need to be included here. Idk why there isn't a massive tax on all kinds of bad corporate behaviors that lead here: buying companies, mergers, stock buybacks and corporate real estate shenanigans should all have serious taxes associated with them.

You gotta stop thinking of it as a left/right thing. It doesn't exist. It's clouding your perspective. Populists vs establishment might be a better way to categorize if you needed just two groups, but that's still too simplistic.

The world is a messy place with lots of different groups trying to get power, enrich themselves, and push their ideology. Whatever ideology a group is pushing has little to do with having the moral high ground and will typically result in their own benefit.

In ww2 Europe 65-75 people had to die before the pendulum swung back. The far right always is responsible for millions of deaths when in control. I think the best prevention would be identifying people with narcissistic and psychopathic personalities and not let them become leaders. We currently reward them in our system

There's nothing quite like today. There's things that are similar, but social media has really made things worse.

Populism is rising because things haven't been great for a lot of people for a long time, and it's too hard to ignore anymore. Globalism and free trade were massively oversold to the masses, it hurt wide swaths of people that have been ignored for decades. People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.

Social media has escalated everything as well. The echo chambers are enormous and essentially impossible to avoid. Many traditional institutions are also extremely weak now that would have forced more interaction between people with differing views and limited extremism. Social media also does a great job in conflating the size of various groups and beliefs, a few dozen people can make a community seem as large and impactful as a few thousand .

Not exactly. I am old enough to remember wondering why gay couples couldn't get legal marriage, and when interracial couples were stared at, and the ozone layer had a hole, and the Satanic Panic, but it felt like we were in a shitty spot but moving in the right direction just painfully slowly. Lots more violence than now.

Something common I see in all these parties is strong disaffection with the current state of their countries and a longing to an idealized past they promise to bring back, to make countries great again…

The past cannot come back, neither will it come back just because some people want it to. It’s completely futile, but people are not rational about this, they’re completely emotional and tribal.

Yes, societies are going through the five stages of grief:

• denial (there are no problems, and if there are, they're the 's fault)
• anger (vote for a strongman) <-- you are here
• bargaining (maybe we can partially go back to the better past)
• depression (this sucks, nothing can be done about it)
• acceptance (well, let's look forward and make the best out of it)

So at most we are talking a bit over 200 years that might be relevant to this. Just fyi if this is unique its not been a possibility for very long history wise.