It's Not Just South America: The Worldwide Move to the Right

Hello, all, and welcome to Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026 — the day before Friday, which is as close to a weekend as a Thursday gets, I guess. Fall has decidedly arrived at the Florack Word Ranch, with the autumn colors starting to show. It's a beautiful place, this time of year. The wind is up, though, so I wonder how long a lot of it will last.

My calendar says it's Fluffernutter Day, Hero Day, Pierogi Day, Touch Tag Day, Salmon Day, World Octopus Day, World Sight Day, and International Podiatry Day. So play tag with a hero, load up on fluffernutters, pierogi, and salmon, give the octopus a good look on World Sight Day, and book your podiatrist now for the touch-tag injuries.

Today in History:

1862: Union forces repulse a Confederate attempt to bring Kentucky into the Confederacy at the Battle of Perryville.
1869: Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, dies in Concord, N.H.
1871: The Great Chicago Fire erupts, killing more than 300 people and destroying more than 17,000 structures over three days, while another deadly blaze breaks out in Peshtigo, Wis.
1895: The Berliner Gramophone Company is founded in Philadelphia.
1918: Cpl. Alvin C. York, who had tried to avoid the draft as a conscientious objector, almost single-handedly kills 25 German soldiers and captures 132 in France's Argonne Forest. There's the full Gary Cooper Movie at that link.
1944: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet debuts on CBS Radio.
1945: President Harry S. Truman announces that only Britain and Canada will share the secret of the atomic bomb. Yeah, right.
1956: Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitches the first perfect game in World Series history, beating the Brooklyn Dodgers 2-0.
1967: Guerrilla leader Che Guevara is captured in Bolivia and executed the next day, ironically giving the T-Shirt industry lots of business from people who never really understand his history.
1970: Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize in literature.
1982: Poland bans all labor organizations, including Solidarity.
1991: Croatia votes to sever its ties with Yugoslavia.
2001: President George W. Bush establishes the Office of Homeland Security.

Birthdays Today include: Juan Perón, former president of Argentina; Mary Engle Pennington, refrigeration engineer; Frank Herbert, novelist (Dune); Chevy Chase, comedian (Caddyshack); Sigourney Weaver, actress (Alien, Ghostbusters); Reed Hastings, Netflix co-founder; and Bruno Mars, singer ("I Just Might").

If today's your birthday, too, you're sharing it with a former Argentine president, the woman who taught the nation to keep its food cold, and the man who gave sandworms their big break. Happy day to you.

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I note with interest our Sarah Anderson's latest, "Hate to Burst Your Bubble, but USAID Didn't Cause the Rightward Swing in Latin America." It's one of her best, and she's right. The timeline alone sinks the theory. I rather suggest that the rightward swing was caused by the left being in power in each of the cases under discussion. As Sarah herself writes:

This swing to the right was happening before Trump was re-elected and took office in January 2025. Costa Rica, for example, already had a right-leaning president in Rodrigo Chaves, who was elected in 2022. When the country went to the polls in February 2026, it elected his hand-picked choice to succeed him, Laura Fernández. Chaves was an anti-establishment populist who was focused on security and often clashed with other branches of government and the media (sound familiar?). He was working with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to curb crime in Costa Rica, including building a mega-prison, and he was moving his country's diplomatic and economic ties away from China and toward the United States.
Then there's Ecuador, a country that has become one of the United States' greatest regional security partners in recent months. Some people like to include it on the list — Daniel Noboa was elected to a full term in a runoff in April 2025. But Noboa was an incumbent. He'd been the country's president since 2023 when it held snap elections to replace the impeached president Guillermo Lasso.
Bukele has governed El Salvador since 2019. Javier Milei was elected in Argentina in 2023. Luis Abinader was elected in the Dominican Republic in 2024.
Marco Rubio announced that 83% of USAID programs were cancelled on March 10, 2025.

So the timeline is the story there. Remember, causing something is not the same as accelerating it's happening. I'm not sure I think so, but I suppose the argument could be made for the demise of USAID accelerating that process. But it's not the cause.

Sarah also lists why the shift is happening, what the real causes are: Crime and personal security, backlash against mass migration, economic frustration, cultural pushback, and what she (rightly, I think) calls socialism fatigue. Notice that nothing on that list requires a USAID line item. If shuttering a foreign aid agency were enough to swing elections, it would rank as the most cost-effective campaign operation in history. Thankfully, it wasn’t all that influential. If it had been so, Obama would have had socialist governments in every country in the hemisphere. I'll give him credit for trying, but he wasn't altogether successful at it.

The people who study this for a living agree. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's International Reports counted nine of 15 Latin American democracies changing direction since 2022, mostly from left to right. Steven Levitsky noted that at least 19 incumbents in a row had lost reelection in the region since 2018. Even New Lines Magazine, hardly a house organ of the right, says the causes run deeper than Trump. Voters didn't need a memo from Washington to notice the cartels, the inflation, and the Venezuelan refugees.

But now, let's widen the lens to include Europe, because there's the real tell.

What’s happening there confirms the thought Sarah puts forward. Populist-right parties have topped the polls in Britain, France, and Germany at the same time for the first time. In late 2025, one aggregate had Reform UK at 27%, headed for a narrow majority. The Conservatives were at 20%, and Labour, the party actually running the country, was stuck in third at 18.5%. An RTL poll put the AfD at 26% to the ruling CDU's 24%. France's Jordan Bardella, filling in for Marine Le Pen after a court barred her, polls around 35% for the first round of the April 2027 election. And Spain votes Nov. 29, after Pedro Sánchez called a snap election when his housing reform collapsed. Polls point to a possible PP-Vox majority.

The causes sound familiar: immigration, stagnant economies, housing costs, and energy prices. Britain's net migration peaked at 924,000 in early 2023, on a Conservative government's watch. France's debt has climbed to 119% of GDP, and its 2026 budget became law without a vote. The EU's own business lobby says the bloc has sat at about 70% of U.S. GDP per capita for three decades and blames regulation and energy costs. Mario Draghi wrote the diagnosis in 2024, and a year later even Draghi wasn't impressed with the progress. Brussels' answer to stagnation has been, as always, another committee, generating yet another report followed by no changes to actual policy.

Now consider the USAID angle in that frame. Sarah notes that the agency's biggest regional budget went to Europe and Eurasia, $17.2 billion in 2023, much of it for Ukraine, against $1.8 billion for Latin America and the Caribbean. None of it went to London, Paris, Berlin, or Madrid. Nor did USAID's demise cause Brexit in 2016, create Germany's AfD in 2013, or manufacture Marine Le Pen. It certainly didn't cause the migration crisis, the housing shortages, or the energy bills. If someone can show me the line item for "Brexit, causing of," I'll reconsider. Until then, I'll take the timeline and place the blame on the shoulders of Europe's socialists and that little conclave of big government over in Brussels.

A side note about Britain's “Conservatives.” I give conservative leader Kemi Badenoch a lot of credit, but let’s face it: they governed for 14 years, and they managed Brexit, if badly, but Reform rose on their watch for a reason. The reason is simple enough: They’re not what even liberal/leftist Americans would consider “conservative.” I mean, spare me. A party that governs from the left under a blue banner still governs from the left, and voters aren't required to give it credit for the label. And as I’ve repeatedly predicted, they haven’t. This led to the rise of Reform, Nigel Farage, and more radical, more grassroots, Tommy Robinson.

I've said often in these spaces that the biggest force pushing voters away from the left is the left in power and the results of their policies. It has always been so.

Here it is, gang: I would call what we're seeing a worldwide gag reflex. A gag reflex is triggered by whatever you're choking on, and gagging is nature's way of solving the problem. It isn't a philosophy. It's an immune response. Trump and the end of USAID didn't cause this one. Voters are reacting to what the worldwide Left has tried to force down their throats.

In fact, I would suggest that Trump is a part of that response, a symptom, not the cause. That's why I've been saying that MAGA will not end with Trump. It's just getting started.

What South America, Europe, and, if I read things correctly, a good part of this country have been choking on is socialism. All of this is playing large in the American Midterm elections.

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Thought for the Day: Perfect games come along once in a century; voters will gladly settle for a government that just throws strikes.

VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts, because your voice matters. You have the floor.

Take care, gang. See you here tomorrow.

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