South Africa was *incredibly* lucky to have de Klerk. He was a National Party member, Afrikaaner, apartheid supporter, etc., He became Prime Minister... and dismantled apartheid and established majority rule, peacefully.
De Klerk was quoted once as saying that the reason apartheid failed was that the whites were too greedy -- basically, that if they'd actually given the good land to the black majority and taken small sections of crappy land for themselves, they would have been able to make it work. (He's not wrong.)
There is no de Klerk for Israel -- Rabin probably would have been Israel's de Klerk, but he was assassinated by right-wing extremists. This is why the modern state of Israel is headed on an inevitable path of self-destruction (with world isolation coming first, as it did for South Africa, but with no de Klerk to rescue them).
Israel established a reputation for beating its neighbors in wars and nobody has openly invaded in a while. I've known a few Israelis who did their military service in the last 20 years. The Israeli military does not have the espirit de corps it had in the early days and while they have better equipment and training than any of their neighbor's armies, they don't have the elite morale they once had. Israel is mall and can't afford to lose much territory.
Another thing is their likely enemy in a future invasion. The field armies they faced in the past were Arab armies with secular leaders. The troops were not really motivated. A future invasion could be a fanatical Muslim army with religious leadership. That would be much tougher to stop.
Saudi Arabia's royal family could topple too. The country is too socially conservative for the rest of the world, but this US administration has decided to liberalize Saudi Arabia by backing the more progressive prince. The Wahabists and House of Saud came to an agreement about running the country 100 years ago and the Wahabists are the ones keeping SA conservative. They are not happy with the liberalizations and they could overthrow the House of Saud. Then SA would become a radical Islamic state. They don't have a huge population, but they do have a lot of wealth.
To ad tp the anecdotes this has been a long term trend for the Reeps cf. Pete Wilson's tenure as governor of California. He was known as a moderate (memory may be faulty here). I was extremely offended by his support of Proposition 187 which was eventually declared unconstitutional. Around 5/9th of voters approved it!! That's millions of voters.
California Proposition 187 - Wikipedia
California is seen as a very progressive place as far as racial politics goes, but that's very recent. California once banned Asians from owning land and the landmark SCOTUS case on the 14th Amendment that established anyone born on US soil was a citizen was a California case where a California born Chinese man had been denied citizenship rights.
The rounding up and internment of the Japanese in WW II was cooked up by the incompetent general in charge of the 4th Army (responsible for defending the western US) and the Republican governor of California who is better known for his later office, Earl Warren. Warren felt so guilty about interning the Japanese he became a minority advocate on the Supreme Court.
California has become a solid blue state only as the Republican Party moved right.
As an outside observer and keen reader on this topic I really just want to criticize the overall discussion held here in this thread. It never cease to amaze me how far the two sides are from each other of their perception of the other side. There really does not seem to be any middle ground and all logic and actual reasoning in between is thrown away. Some people here really needs to do some self-reflection and take a step back to view it more holistically, especially the ones that are usually known for sound reasoning and logical approach. The views and arguments from 1 year ago have changed drastically to the extreme in this thread.
2 Years does not correlate with the picture that is painted above, small tendencies possibly but not the overall picture. This whole thing seems to me to be exactly the same as the Short-sellers vs Tesla fanatics debacle which is sad.
I am a student of history. I started reading books aimed at adult audiences about it when I was 6.
I also make an attempt to understand both modern parties. My personal politics have always fallen pretty much in the middle in many areas. Up until 2000 I was an extremely independent voter, but I thought GW Bush was too dangerous.
I know the term "Nazi" has become a throw away term on the internet to dismiss anyone for just about any reason. I understand what the National Socialist German Workers' Party really stood for. The early to mid-20th century saw a number of ultra nationalist movements. Similar movements existed in western democracies, but didn't get very far. Though there were Nazi sympathizers among the British ruling class and one of them almost became PM instead of Churchill. They gained power in Spain, Italy, and a few other smaller countries.
Only in Germany did the fascists have their hands on the industrial power to field a potent, modern army along with a tradition of military discipline. Italy had an industrial base, but it was weaker than Germany and the country is fundamentally too disorganized to get everybody marching in the same direction at the same time. When fighting the Western Allies Italy was also hampered by the fact that a large percentage of their field troops had first cousins or closer living in the US and liked the US and the officer class was full of Anglophiles who liked everything British.
Fascism died out to a large degree after World War II. It held on in Spain until Franco died much like communism had held on in a few places after the Soviet Union broke up, but in a different fashion from Soviet communism. The Chinese are still technically communist, but they have revamped their economic system to be capitalist, so they really aren't communist anymore.
Both US political parties were mostly in agreement about foreign policy and extreme political views after WW II. Both rejected both fascism and communism. I have heard conjecture that it may have been the former Nazis brought to the US for their rocketry knowledge, or it may have just been the flux of history, but fascism started to creep back in. This time in American politics on the right.
After WW II, both the Russians and Americans scooped up as many German engineers and scientists as they could who had worked on advanced projects like rocketry. In the USSR the scientists were mostly isolated and were not allowed to influence political thought. In the United States they were allowed to be free members of society as long as they didn't bring up their past.
Some of these technical people were ashamed of their past and were happy to put it behind them and embraced their second chance. Others were avowed Nazis who may have had some indirect influence on American thought. It's hard to tell for sure.
In any case, the extreme conservatives came above ground in th early 1960s as the John Birch Society after the first Catholic was elected president. They were backed by a wealthy business man named Fred Koch.
The John Birch Society was on the fringes, but was disturbing enough to the Democrats that every time a Democrat has been elected president since the Koch family has spun up a new conservative group to torture the administration. During Jimmy Carter's presidency it was the Moral Majority. During Clinton it was the Militia Movement, and during Barack Obama's time it was the Tea Party.
Ronald Reagan used the Moral Majority to win over Evangelical Christians. A type of Christianity very rare in Europe today. They are socially very, very conservative and their influence is a contributing factor to why the US is behind Europe in a number of social areas.
The UK has a similar party, the DUP in Northern Ireland. They currently have a few seats in Parliament and are part of Teresa May's ruling coalition. Ethnically the DUP and the core of the Evangelical Christians have a lot of overlap. The core center for Evangelical Christianity in the US is in the Appalachia region and areas settled from that region. The people in that region are the only Americans who ethnically identify as "American" (the rest of us either identify ethnically by the region our ancestors came from or from specific countries our ancestors came from even if we've never been there, it's different from the rest of the world).
By the American standards of ethnic identification, most people in Appalachia are what people call Scots-Irish. They were largely Protestants forced out of Scotland in the 1600s and later. Some settled in Northern Ireland and identify as "Protestant" today. Some of those people moved from Ireland to join their ethnic kin in Appalachia. So the core ethnic group came from Scotland, but some with a stop over in Ireland got a generation or more.
Since Reagan the socially conservative right has had a major influence on the Republican Party. Conservative media which started on AM radio in the late 80s and then moved to a satellite/cable channel with Fox News in the late 90s uses whatever hooks it can to reel in as many people as it can. It plays on the prejudices of the social conservatives as much as possible. Both cultural prejudices like liberals want to terminate every pregnancy or other wild characterizations of liberals and ethnic divisions.
Much of Appalachia is fairly rural with cities being smaller than most other parts of the country. It's also been a very white dominated part of the country for most of American history. Most of the coastal states have had more immigration throughout the country's history and in the last 50 years most of that immigration has been non-white. The cities of those states have seen the most non-white immigration.
The US "Deep" South was a different. Places like Texas, South Florida, and southern Louisiana (which was always a big ethnic mix) now have fairly diverse populations, but in large parts of the South there have only been two ethnic groups for 400 years: European whites and African Americans with a lot of history wrapped up in slavery. The Deep South is where whites are likely to hold the most resentment about the US Civil War because of the ethnic tensions that have existed since. Those wounds were re-opened in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act which forced whites to stop openly oppressing the African American population. It pushed the oppression underground.
During the Obama presidency the conservative media found a rich vein in racial hatred of Obama and they milked it to stir up trouble for Democrats. Roger Ailes was a member of the Nixon White House who dreamed up a conservative propaganda channel in the early 1970s and he was the first president of Fox News. Rupurt Murdoch who started Fox News and his empire still owns it didn't not envision anything as radical as what Fox became, but Ailes ran with it and Murdoch let him because Fox became the biggest money maker in the Murdoch empire.
Ailes was forced out in a sex scandal and Murdoch's sons have taken over. Both are much more liberal than their father, but they haven't been able to stop the propaganda machine at Fox because it is currently the only thing holding together the Murdoch empire.
Donald Trump's original idea was to run for president, lose, complain about the game being rigged, then start a new cable news channel with Roger Ailes. That didn't go as planned because Ailes died suddenly (after a fall in the bathroom and hit his head) and Trump won the presidency.
Trump won in large part because of the outrage machine Fox and the rest of the conservative media created. The Republicans have used that outrage since the 90s to bamboozle conservative media consumers into voting for them against their best interests. But in 2016 it slipped out of their control and they elected the monster they created. Now they struggle to try and control the beast they created.
On the other side, the Democrats have not gone through this period unaffected. Back in the late 90s I read an article from a domestic violence counselor who identified that the dynamic between the two US political parties was virtually identical to the dynamic between an abusive spouse and their victim. The Republicans being the abuser.
A lot of Democrats in office now have PTSD from all the abuse. Many have spent 20 years being reactionary to the next round of abuse. New blood is coming in and if this election goes the way it looks like it might, there will be a lot of new blood in American politics on the Democratic side. The new faces are more like the children of an abusive relationship, they witnessed it and were affected by it, but have a different perspective on it than their victim parent. They see the game more than their victim parent did.
As far as actual policy goes, the Republicans have become devoid of any real policy and try to get by on slogans. This administration is so bad at it every policy they try to do blows up in their faces because they don't have a clue how to do policy.
Th Democrats actually do still have a grip on policy and try to implement it as much as they can. When Obama became president, he tried very hard to give Republicans a seat at the table and take in their views. When it became obvious they had no interest in contributing to policy, they just wanted to destroy Democrats, he gave up trying.
As the abuse has mounted, Democrats have become less and less willing to negotiate, but if the other side genuinely came and wanted to negotiate in good faith, they might be wary, but they would be open to it once it became clear it was genuine. That's not true of the Republicans. 100% politics 0% policy. They can't govern effectively because they have run out of real ideas. Kansas was supposed ot be a conservative idea breeding ground, but the Republicans there have practically run the state into the ground.
In US politics there is only one party left who are adults wanting to run a modern democratic republic: the Democrats. The Republicans are 21st century fascists with a cult following. No major country in the world has been this close to turning fascist since the 1930s. And this one has the world's largest military by a huge margin. Much vaster resources and military might than any fascist power ever had.
Trump is tariff happy for a reason. He wants to bring all manufacturing back to the US so the US can go it alone against the rest of the world. That's his mindset. When he says "America First" he means it in a similar way Hitler meant it with Germany first. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Trump is probably the most incompetent fascist the world has ever seen and the opposition in the US is strong. But the battle is not won yet.
This comes from my living the rise of the fascist right in the US with a deep understanding of what fascism really is and how it came about in other countries in the early to mid-20th century. I've always rejected the internet meme as too simplistic and it hasn't been true until now.
I admit I don't have a good outsider's perspective because I have never lived outside the US political system. But I do consume news and opinions from outside the US and have for many years. I'm mono-lingual (I have tried learning other languages, but it doesn't come naturally to me and I don't have the time to put in the effort) so it's only English language information, but I strive to understand all perspectives as best I can.
