The Stasi would be gobsmacked.

If the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Ministry for State Security) had had a crystal ball 40 years ago they would have promoted capitalism, the sheer amount of information people are willing to give away for free would have made their job so easy.

Now in a functioning democracy that would be fine with the checks and balances in place, the problem is there seems to be very few functioning democracies.

The right wing in many “western” democracies has rejected the mushy centrist policies and moved to a more radical/authoritarian groupthink. Nostalgia [for a time that never was], racial purity, nationalism and nativism being prominent doctrines. In many cases they do not even try and hide it e.g. Brexit. The truth, meh.

The trick is trying to get people to vote for them, in the US the adoption of the Southern Strategy and then coupled voter suppression were used to tip the scales against representative democracy, the refusal to update the electoral college another.

Couple all these to propaganda and misinformation media dividing a nation is child's play.

Then promoting an orange billionaire grifter to “working man's hero” (whose main skill set appears to be in avoiding personnel bankruptcy) becomes possible. Beware of hailing a hero, let history do that for you when all the data is in, even then they might get it wrong.

The next step is to deny the election results [only when not in their favour] to convince their base that it was stolen, however those with power know the truth, they believe that this is not a problem, I say beware of the Pandora’s box you opened, it will be a lot harder to close.

I am dreading the next French presidential elections, once again the run-off will be Macron v Le Pen and will be a lot closer than the last time. The next twenty years are unfortunately going to be “interesting”. I cannot believe we are fighting the fascists/totalitarians all over again did we learn nothing?

Just a thought.