Many people are rightly decrying the results of the Dutch elections, with the party of the gutter racist Geert Wilders winning the most seats in a multi-party election. And it is bad news. But rather than some huge defining moment of our times, it’s more of an indication of how modern politics is careening back and forth from the depredations of hyper-capitalism and profiteering oligarchs, now more powerful than nation-states, which conceded their authority to the bipartisan extremism of the neoliberal consensis long ago.
Ordinary people long for change and cast about, not always wisely, trying this, trying that, but never finding it in systems committed to preserving the unrestrained power of profiteers at the expense of the common good. Wilders does well in Holland (although 35 seats out of 150 is not a sweeping mandate); Meloni wins in Italy; but at the same time the Right is defeated in Poland and Spain. The centrist Obama wins, then Trump wins, then Biden wins and now Trump might well win again. Argentina picks a rightwing nutball as president; Brazil ousts its rightwing nutball Bolsonaro and elects the radically progressive Lula.
The Right is rising, yes, with funding by the oligarchs and hypercapitalists. But the general trend is not a single ideological line; it’s chaos and confusion. People sense, at some level, that we’re facing a multitude of systemic, institutional, even civilizational collapses on a world-historical scale; and they see that neither our hypercapitalist-accommodating centrists nor the slobbering, frothing Right offers any real solution. Hence the wild swings back and forth on the political spectrum in country after country.
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