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In reality, far from stopping the far right, Germany is implementing a far right agenda. Increase police authority? Check. Scapegoat immigrants and other marginalized groups? Check. Build up the military? Check. Suppress protests and dissenters? Check. Impose austerity, providing the fertile ground for fascists? Check.
By the time the AfD comes to power, they won't have to do anything. The liberals (including socdems and greens) will already have created a fascist society.
The same is happening to France. As you said, they'll have a field day when (at this point it's not if, it's when) they get to power.
Gotta love neoliberalism...
The Netherlands will very likely have a right wing government and will be heading down the same path. Same with Italy, Sweden, Denmark.
With the next European election this year the right wing parties in the European Parliament will gain a lot of traction.
We could be heading down the American path and lose a lot or the progress we made over the last 2 decades.
I will be a father in a couple or hours. Between the right taking to power and accelerating climate change i am just so fucking worried in what kind of world my kids will grow up.
Are you living in a different Germany than me? There are sadly things going on to make immigration harder. But other than that, things are okay.
Make immigration harder??? Nice euphemism for this fascist shit. They're throwing human rights out of the window. They're literally putting migrants into concentration camps, if they're don't drown first thanks to Frontex pushbacks. Greens defended this so-called compromise to their base while fascist Meloni was giving victory speeches.
"Endlich im großen Stil abschieben" (Scholz). I can't tell the difference an NPD slogan and the SPD chancellor.
And for the other shit, there's some extra police authority or surveillance law proposed every other month or so. Pro-palestine protests are criminalized and they're threatening Muslims with deportation for not being loyal enough to Israel. All the parties are discussing what sort of services they can cut so they have more money for the military. Real wages are shrinking. You can't open a newspaper without reading about how Germany needs to prepare for war. Things are not okay.
Take your meds
Build up the military?
Any source on that? We do not have a military right now. Wouldn't be bad if we wanted to defend ourselves against Putin.
Yeah yeah, I remember all that shit from back in the day. Die Russen kommen! Die Russen kommen! Oldest trick in the book.
Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land. -- Hermann Göring
Also, I love that you want a source for something that was a top news story for months. You somehow heard, dass die Russen kommen!!! but not the Sondervermögen? You're just fucking with me, aren't you?
If it helps, I’m a (terrified) immigrant in Germany and it’s really confusing. I don’t know why there’s so much certainty in media reports about things that aren’t certain. It could be a language barrier, but I assume mild shade whenever Konjunktiv I comes up, so I’m probably interpreting that as unfairly noncommittal.
Examples: Scholz wanted to disallow immigrants from working, then make them work to be eligible for citizenship, whatever is happening with marijuana, I read about Wagenknechts new party more than a year before she actually formed it.
Do liberals have a theory for why fascism is sprouting up around the world?
Because Marxists are like 
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Fascism
It's tough to be critical of "liberalism" when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify "economic liberalism".
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
So that's the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
All I'm saying is that if you don't take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the "correct" (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn't well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody
Yeah you do that.
I'm getting downvotes because I'm telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It's why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn't have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don't drop the word "liberalism" into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use "corporatism" which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it's technically incorrect, but language also isn't static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don't assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
The only people I know of who don't know what the word "liberal" means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don't like most Americans, I'm not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying "liberal" and knows it's a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn't have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don't already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what's being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for "the average person."
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition
"Neoliberalism" rather. Though that's more like mask-off imperialism. And "corporatism" is just capitalism but when you don't want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
I don't think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.
Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.
Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.
A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is... it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.
However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody 'think global, act local', or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?
That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.
That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I'd consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn't interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc...), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I'd want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).
I think putting one's viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.
Lol I'm sure Prolewiki is an unbiased source that the majority of people would agree with on the definitions of words. /s
Where did he say that the majority of people agree with this definition?
Well, the majority of workers in the US probably did, until the labor movements were crushed in the 60s and 70s
If the majority of people don't agree on the proposed meaning of a word then that isn't what the words mean. In other words, it is wrong.
It's a materialist/Marxist definition, hence the
Because Marxists are like
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
And so we can choose to act towards restoring definitions to words with important meanings, so that we become capable of discussing the things they signify again.
If we don't use words as they mean, but instead use unorthodox terminology, then we allow the significance of such words to be lost, with no standardized alternatives in common use - i.e., no alternatives that are any more clear than the original word.
There is a war on language. It's primarily a subset of the class war. We can surrender, or fight what is probably the simplest fight of our life: We can use words as they were meant to be used.
Yeah, I'm glad you're slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I'm informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
I'm sorry you don't understand how languages work
Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights
Communists had to pry these concessions from liberalism with organized violence, don't pretend like liberalism did these things.
You quoted me, then immediately misquoted me. I didn't say what you think I said.
Sorry should have phrased it as "people shouldn't pretend..."
Honest question: when did communists use organized violence to abolish slavery? To win LGBT+ rights?
A lot of radical abolitionists were communists
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.
honestly there seems to be some confusion/distinction only in the US.
i think most people elsewhere mean mostly "neoliberal capitalism" when they say "liberal".
Let's see if any Lemmy users are able to correctly identify why this is happening. Bonus points for American-Style ignorance
Hitler 2: Facist Bugaloo?
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD. Some have even launched a campaign to ban the AfD altogether.
You see, democracy is when...
Are you surprised that the country that ushered the Nazis into power is more vigilant about making sure they never head remotely in that direction again?
Even the party’s leader resigned in 2022 because he saw that the party was becoming more totalitarian and incompatible with German democracy.
You see, we call it Wehrhafte Demokratie. According to Wikipedia this can be translated as battlesome democracy, though I find that clunky.
The entire idea of our constitution is to keep a democracy, we even have a constitutional right to disobedience, if democracy is threatened.
The constitution is deliberately very open, but there's one thing that's non-negotiable: FDGO, liberal-democratic basic order. If you're operating outside of that, you're not supposed to be part of the political landscape.
L take. AES countries which are actual democracies do the same thing.
Though of course, banning it isn't gonna go anywhere for Germany unless they tackle the root cause of capitalism.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Germans have already had a front-row seat to the rise of so-called illiberal democrats in Poland and Hungary who used their power to stack courts with pliant judges and silence independent media.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD.
But every remedy holds its own dangers, leaving German politicians threading a course between safeguarding their democracy and the possibility of unwittingly providing the AfD with tools it could someday use to hobble it.
Hesse’s rival mainstream parties came together to pass a “democracy package,” rewriting several parliamentary rules, including one that effectively blocked the AfD from the intelligence committee.
In the eastern state of Thuringia, mainstream lawmakers also wanted to block the AfD from their intelligence committee, and initially agreed to put their differences aside and vote for each other’s candidates.
Some measures under discussion would give law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies more latitude, never an easy step in a country that experienced both Fascism and Communism in the last century.
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