It’s funny how common this sentiment is though. My dad started voting for the AfD citing similar words. The very same people do not even notice how this trains them in 3-4 steps to be a voter for a fascist party themselves, it’s why it is so genius/scary. They still think they’re doing the right thing, even when actively supporting what breaks their own ability of doing anything to begin with.

Really goes to show how strong a strictly-controlled corporate mass media with an inherent corporate agenda can be. Billionaires enjoy fascist or ultra-right control as it keeps them out of any external checks and balances. And with their influence on media by owning said media, they get to highlight individual issues and hype them up to be as dealbreaking as they want them to be, while burying a long list of individual good things that happens so that people never get into a positive attitude.

There was this fascinating summary a while ago how much the german SPD did to improve the situations specifically for those groups of people who the AfD bemoaned as being “forgotten about” in one of their polemics. And it was curious to see how little you hear about this simply because being a lot of individually small improvements over a certain number of years, there’s nothing big that has to be reported, and giant right-wing media conglomerates can hence easily bury the good news and focus on individual aggro issues instead.

People are also different nowadays because back a few generations ago when things went to shit, people pulled together and dropped their differences. Nowadays when things globally turn bad and hard times come up, everyone segregates and starts blaming everybody else instantly, which again just makes them very vulnerable to fascism.