this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Europe is only a decent place to live because it's reliant on imperialism, and until now has been able to rely on the US Empire propping up NATO to lower Europe's millitary spending. Now that imperialism is drying up and the US Empire no longer wants to be the only one paying for NATO, European countries are enforcing austerity and sliding to the far-right.
To be fair, far-right ideologies have been ramping up worldwide since a decade or two.
The current political context just embolden the far right actors to go mask off.
But why? What is the material cause of this? I'd say it's the gradual decline in imperialism breeding right-wing populism as the smaller capitalists are pressed downward toward the working classes, and the necessity of austerity to cover for losses in gains from imperialism.
There is certainly a big part that can be attributed to imperialism, but my (uneducated) pet theory is that technocrats were able to harness the accessibility of big data after the great recession to siphon wealth from working class a lot more efficiently, by radicalizing people.
There had been a big leap from 2005 to 2015-2016 on computing power that enabled the widespread of big data and the corpos with the means to get in on it used it to further enrich their corporation and themselves and created this extremely toxic environment where everything is polarized and monetized.
And with big data, populists can change in real time their message so that they get more money and influence. And tribalism seems to work pretty fucking well. So they finetuned their message to radicalize people and achieve that goal.
People can isolate themselves into online communities that will echo and amplify their views of the world. And now they are pouring on the streets because they've became enough of a big group to do so.
Technocrats created this big machine to get rich, and the machine feed itself, giving more power to the ultra rich, which grab more power and influence by radicalizing people.
I think one thing that would help, is looking into cultural hegemony. The tools have changed, so too has how hegemony functions.