Europe is a continent soaked in economic pessimism. Until we change that, the far right will rise and rise | Owen Jones

"After all, it is already the US's present reality. American exceptionalism once held that such an outcome was impossible in the world's oldest continuous constitutional republic, with its system of separation of powers and no history of despotism. Yet the country is now ruled by a self-styled king, centralising executive power, weaponising the justice system, attacking civil society and neutralising the media."

"The advance of the far right rests on a simple, corrosive premise. Since the financial crash, western publics have been encouraged to believe they are trapped in a zero-sum game, forced to compete for ever-diminishing resources. The far right's message is brutally straightforward: if there is not enough to go around, why are our scarce resources being handed to migrants? Remove the undeserving competition, it argues, and the indigenous population will flourish once more."

"The facts say otherwise. On average, foreign arrivals are net contributors to European economies. Between 2014 and 2018, for instance, migrants contributed about 1,500 more per capita than European-born citizens. In Germany, without migrants the labour force would shrink, condemning the country to an even deeper economic malaise. Facts, alas, mean little in the so-called immigration debate, particularly when mainstream politicians respond to far-right advances by echoing their language and demonising migrants assisted by inflammatory"

Donald Trump's National Security Strategy commits the US to cultivating resistance in European nations against immigration, and US support strengthens far-right patriotic parties. Far-right authoritarianism has become a plausible future for Europe and mirrors developments already visible in the United States, where executive power is centralized, the justice system is weaponized, civil society is attacked and the media neutralized. The far right exploits a zero-sum narrative after the financial crash to blame migrants for scarce resources. Migrants are on average net contributors to European economies; Germany depends on migration to sustain its labor force. Mainstream politicians echoing far-right language deepen the immigration debate's distortions.

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