Mirth Then MAGA came along and showed a clear playbook for how these groups could go mainstream again - using free speech and immigration as a gateway to push US cultural and religious agendas that are not inherently issues here.
Thing is the cultural and religious agendas weren't exactly inherent to United States politics either.
The dominionist Christian Right element, present but not militant in the 1970s, was politically activated in the US by the so-called "Southern strategy" in the Reagan era. This was very much the template for how first the Tories, and now Reform have gone after the de-industrialising and relatively impoverished north of the UK. This element has now got its institutions and its long-term constituency in the United States, which together offer some clue about the direction all the flag-waving heads over decades in the UK, Australia, or anywhere else.
The seemingly inexorable trajectory of decline of the post-industrial western economies has been formed by the regressive transfer of the ongoing value of production to capital, rather than labour. This has shifted in Australia by about 25% in the last half century, for example (that's about AUD500bn pa, more than enough to solve the mental maths problems of the deficit politics that continue to justify the erosion of public goods).
This depredation has its analogue in most places you look, and its impact on socially felt and perceived inequality, and on access to goods once seen as written into the social contract, such as housing and a functional health system, is the engine of a rational mass resentment which is open to all. For instance, this resentment is open to "woke" and "anti-woke", Remainer and Brexiteer alike.
To repeat, there's nothing irrational per se about the scale of bad feeling in the political landscape. After all, most of the population is experiencing a variation of "solastalgia", the term coined for the melancholy that accompanies living through the decline of a way of life. The melancholic valence of the mood of Gramsci's "time of monsters". And this feeling afflicts both rich and poor alike, for what it's worth. It's not as if those who are thriving usually have a clear grasp on why things still seem to be getting worse overall. Winners merely essentialise deficiency in the socially marginal elements produced by the tendency, and merit in themselves as they imagine they're bucking the trend.
And a reactionary traditionalist fixation on social "degeneracy" is a hallmark of incipient fascism that goes along perfectly well with what the majority feels. A fear of social collapse is reinterpreted as a deep-seated desire for a program of repressive social violence to ward off collapse … and to make everything great again.
With the likes of Lynton Crosby having generalised the Southern strategy into an operational science of chauvinist wedge politics over decades, globe-trotting to run conservative campaigns across the English-speaking world, there's no need any more to make MAGA the culprit. It's more the case that Trump and MAGA is the particular symptom right at the core of the empire, accompanied by a schizophrenic version of the imperial belligerence that has been the US calling card since WWII, and a clowning leader whose farcical antics veil the deeper problems of the whole hegemonic formation.
The aggregation of the ideological currents by way of which the resentment is displaced then determines the politics of the day—"migrants", or "otherness" in general tend to be an easy place to divert the rage since these fantasy images are complemented by ignorance, misinformation and paranoia.
