Putin’s Russia is the first country that has deliberately made the carnival a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policies – in fact, of its entire post-Soviet political architecture. The first country to have established, one decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a full-fledged TV-run postmodern dictatorship – a so-called “managed democracy”.
Knowledge and skills that we usually associate with entrepreneurial activities seem to be a natural means to broaden the group of people that we can intrigue with our message. Liberty philosophers, as long as they are willing to come out to the agora of their polis, need to think the way the entrepreneurs do.
Similarly to Le Pen, Donald Trump or Brexit, Kotleba has been playing on the same phenomenon (the frustrated, dissatisfied people), which he skillfully manipulates to such an extent that he easily gets public support. The real threat to Europe is right now posed by Europeans themselves.
If you think that these trends won’t affect you, because although you still have plenty time before you retire, or because you are not a blue-collar worker, don’t cheer too soon. The development of artificial intelligence can bring robotization and automatization not only to sectors where manual work with often repeated actions is needed.
We must not remain silent, we must not accept fear. The government is still in power because it made people believe that it will protect them from the immigrants, NGOs, the EU and capitalistic and imperialistic American interests. And in the meantime they make people terrified of dissent.
An important aspect of the argument promoting the benefits of the right to possess firearms lies in the relationship between the illegal owners of the latter and their aim to use the weapons as the means of coercion. Such individuals possess weapons for one fundamental reason: because the others do not have it.
The non-partisan or opposition media in Hungary is in decline as the influence of the government increases, since the populist governing party owns a large part of the local media. The government takes more and more drastic steps to silence voices of dissent.
The answer to populism is not more populism. Demagogues can be defeated without lies. In the recent U.S. election two extremely untrustworthy candidates tried to outbid each other in telling the biggest lies. You can promise blood, sweat and tears and still be loved.
We like, we share, we comment. And hence we feel that we did something good. Online activity and social media instead of encouraging being more active in real life, became a substitute of real action. Meanwhile, those who rule our countries will not get scared because of our “likes”.
It is not true that we face a drastic crisis of liberal movements – it is the alternative to these organizations that has changed radically as a result of a deep structural crisis of the left wing. To put it plainly and oversimplifying a little, the democratic struggle in the Western world takes place between the “liberal” and “non-liberal” camps.
