Portside

Reader Comments: Trump Calls Out White Supremacists; Trump and Military Veterans; Billionaires Plunder Working Folks; Allende Remembered - the Other 9/11; Why Congress Must Act - COVID Jobs Losses Continues; Lots of Announcements; and more...

Ammon and Ryan Bundy are presently on trial in federal court for leading the 41-day armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur federal wildlife refuge earlier this year. Among other things, they demanded the government privatize thousands of acres of public lands. While their supporters are quick to separate their anti-public lands crusade from their racist tirades, a historical review finds that in the West, privatization and racial hatred have always been intertwined.

Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection...it's largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. The reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies is: Good old fashioned jingoism - the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.

Across Europe, voters are turning to far-right parties, won over by nationalism, anti-immigrant hysteria and failed economic policies of austerity. In Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and Sweden, far right parties have made gains. Left political parties in these countries have not been as successful as those in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

The press has largely blown the biggest political story of the last fifty years: not the shocking rise of Donald Trump, but how the GOP slowly set the stage for him.