This is How the Right Destroys Democracy

None of what's happening in the U.S. or Europe is much of a surprise. The playbook for authoritarians is pretty predictable: undermine democratic politics by following the letter of the law while systematically undermining its norms and institutions, find social cleavages you can exploit to pit people against one another, and wring every advantage you can out of social and economic crises.

What infuriates me is that, just like Europeans in the 1930's, today's Western center and center-left elites are so blind and pusillanimous that they are incapable of coming to grips with either the Great Recession, the rise of Teabaggers and the National Fronts, or the consequences of their own mistakes.

What Are They Doing To My Favorite Foreign Country?!?

I've been an Hispanophile since I was a teenager, and achieved one of my life's ambitions a couple of years ago when I finally went to Spain. It was a dream come true. I loved every minute of it, and am developing a secret plan on how to get back there.

Now apparently the austerians are trying to destroy it. What is wrong with the Powers That Be in the EU that they think the solution to a weak economy is to weaken it further? Of course, the people suffering are people who work for a living (or would like to), not rentiers and their financial industry henchmen, so I suppose I already know answer.