My wife had a brief career in state-level politics and this article resonated with me. Rather than national politics or media narratives, I thought of specific state level senators, representatives, and administrators she had to interact with.

It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.

At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.

Any sort of extremism can be fought if you provide all people with opportunity. Its not just a social saftey net but also a purpose and jobs and the idea of a better future.

IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.

The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.

> they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged

I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.

The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.

Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.

Hope that provides some context.

On your first phrase, you can look at how the actual proper-name Fascism and its friends happened. Or at any anti-democratic movement from the current ones all the way back to the ancient Rome's rise of the empire.

This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.

On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.

> Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the ... social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged.

This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.

Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.

I bet you are someone who can't believe why Trump keeps winning. And yet you continue to whine about "mediocre white males" and wonders why white men vote for the other guy.