 The right vibes La ultraderecha is the Spanish-language equivalent of “the far right.” In Latin American journalism, it is often applied to Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Donald Trump — as is the “far right” label, in English-language writing. That’s odd, says the foreign-affairs writer Snowden Todd, because those politicians are wildly different: Bukele is a former communist, Trump is a protectionist, Milei is a libertarian. “What really unites la ultraderecha,” says Todd, “is its antagonism.” Milei and Bukele, says Todd, “have so far accomplished much of what they set out to do.” El Salvador had staggeringly high crime. Argentina had a huge deficit and crippling tariffs on imports. These problems were real, everyday ones for most citizens, Todd argues, meaning that both men were strongly incentivized to fix them: If they did not, people would notice. Is that true in the US? “How material are Trump’s populist causes to most people?” Most people will not lose their job to an immigrant, for instance. Instead, Trump’s incentives are to shift the vibes: To push abstractions, rather than material solutions. A market for lemons The median driver in Britain is probably a 40-ish woman called Jennifer who owns a decade-old Ford Fiesta. Perhaps Jennifer feels her beloved old car is getting a bit old and needs replacing. What should she do? Well, says the tech writer Martin Robbins, she’s in trouble. While her old Fiesta cost her £13,500 ($16,000) in 2014, the cheapest realistic alternative now would be at least £21,000. It would also be much larger and heavier, and it would probably be an SUV, because Britain’s car market is broken. These “massive increases in price, size and weight” are all down to mandatory safety systems and the requirement to move to electric and hybrid drivetrains. “You simply can’t fit all this stuff” in smaller cars, and it’s expensive. Cheaper electric cars exist, he says, but are bad: The “most affordable” is £15,000, achieves 0-60mph in a sloth-like 20 seconds, and takes 45 minutes to charge. “Jennifer and millions like her feel poorer,” says Robbins, and that’s true in many countries. It may not be the only or even the biggest issue behind rising anti-government sentiment in the West, “but ‘you made my car twice as expensive’ is a good example.” Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be The internet is nostalgic for the 1990s. “Sure, you’ve got the weird raw milk trad people yearning for the ’50s,” writes the pseudonymous blogger Cartoons Hate Her, but most people know that was worse, really. The 1990s, though, had modern medicine and mostly equal rights, and people seem to believe that it was all a big party in massive Home Alone-style houses with low crime and happy one-income families. The thing is, she says, it’s (mostly) just not true. Life wasn’t safer, she says on Slow Boring: The US was far more violent in the 1990s. Car deaths have plummeted. Food was worse: Mandatory nutrition standards have banned things like trans fats. People enjoy more luxuries, like overseas travel and eating at restaurants. What has changed is that housing costs are higher and families are more atomized — young people are more likely to move to different cities, so there’s less intergenerational childcare. But the main reason for nostalgia, she thinks, is that “twenty-something people today are simply poorer than their parents were in their forties.” They remember “a backyard pool and frequent vacations — because they were ten and their parents were forty-five.” |
