Valid, but don’t take credit away from the Republican’s long-running variations on “The Southern Strategy”, sowing fear and contempt not just for minorities, but for the traitorous liberals who dared to speak for minorities. The alt-right isn’t giddy over Trump because of anything Democrats did a generation ago, but for stuff the GOP has been promoting for at least as long. And the victories the GOP wrangled via the Southern Strategy also helped push the Democrats more towards the right during the Reagan era, out of a struggle to hold onto power.
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I visited some site yesterday which explicitly said this. It IS now an Obamoid Communo-Muslim state because their school was discussing bathroom rights for transgendered kids. People are seeking refuge in the golden days that never were because they can’t reconcile their preferred way of life with contemporary cultural dialogs.
ETA: Sorry, I am trying to post coherently while sneezing
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I can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of driving through the country anymore. Beautiful landscapes where cows and horses graze, ruined barns, ancient churchyard cemeteries, and…constant reminders that the people who live here are racist gun nuts.
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Sowing implies planting seeds that weren’t already there. Rather they put down fertilizer on top of already existing racial hatred.
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Now THAT is a great article. And being a red to blue guy myself, can totally relate.
I agree with you that mocking their anger and disillusion isn’t helping the situation, but the real mistake we’ve made has been in legitimizing fascism as an acceptable part of the American political discourse. The media want to look unbiased and non-partisan, and of course they love the ratings that Trump brings, but he never belonged on SNL or Jimmy Fallon. This election should never have been covered like a horse race. Even if Trump loses, its been established that you can run for office on an openly racist, authoritarian platform and the worst you’ll have to endure is some polite sketch comedy.
I’m all for getting to the root of the problem and redressing the grievances that led us here, but at the same time I’m not willing to humor people who support fascism, whether they’re motivated by outright hate, or whether they’re simply going along with it out of frustration with the American political/economic system. Once they get into power, they’re not going to compromise with us. They’re not going to respect the rule of law, or honor our free speech rights. They’re threatening us, and though we do need to stay true to our own principles, we’re currently showing them far too much tolerance.
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Trump supporters are virtually all partisan Republicans - they’re the same people who voted for Romney, McCain, Bush, etc. They’ve always hated Clinton. The GOP since the Southern Strategy has use a false sense of grievance, racism, xenophobia, rural resentment of urban values, and general resentment, deceit, hate, and fear as a way to motivate the base. While Trump bumped up the volume he’s not diverging from the script. Rank and file Republicans in most of the country have generally been forgiving of racism, xenophobia, and ignorance because the GOP’s highest value has been to attain power for power’s sake - ideology is only a secondary issue. Pretending they’re a special group of people who suddenly appeared in America and need to be analyzed as some new group of people is confused.
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As if a person can shut off those conditions which are tied to racist conspiracist bullshit.
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When I drove nearly ten years ago cross country through the heartland I saw a ton of dead towns, military contractors, and likely meth-related crime scenes (cordoned off).
The Right never takes responsibility for their children. Just project their evils and blame onto the left.
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No, you don’t.
As I said, the current US fascist population appears to be about 1/10th of the country. Which is dangerously high, but still nowhere near a majority.
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to Quote Cory: “This is really the only article you need to read to understand the
psyche of Trump’s base, because it’s the only article that’s been
written on this subject, over and over again.”
To Quote Voldemort: “Wrong”
Although not my usual blog read: American Conservative has an insightful Q&A with a Yale-schooled Lawyer born in Appalachia, who keeps a foot in both worlds.
“RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago
tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s
common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of
the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy”
tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.
J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there
hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles
in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.”
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I think I agree with in general with what you’re saying,
I’d like to see Trump subject to much greater scrutiny,
for there to be blunt confrontation of him for and his movement shifting the Overton window towards fascism.
But I think it is a disastrous strategy to approach Trump supporters without compassion, to be unwilling to listen and understand their motivations.
I suspect many Trump supporters support him purely for emotional reasons, they feel welcomed to into his tent, they don’t feel mocked or inadequate by his language. I don’t think their emotional needs are more valid than the needs of immigrants, muslims, women, but to dismiss the emotions of Trump supporters, to speak of them as fascists who should not be negotiated with, actually helps people like Trump draw their followers closer and alienates them further from progressive politics
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I didn’t say they were the same argument - they obviously aren’t! The question that it seems to raise was whether the tribalism was being accelerated, rather than reduced; there were a number of people who self-identified as “Bernie Bros” (or whatever) and who reacted badly when he didn’t win the nomination; they have some similarities in terms of personality types with some of the Trump supporters who may well react badly when he doesn’t win the election.
I don’t expect the world to go up in flames, and it’s entirely possible that it will be a good thing in the longer run (as people on all sides see the merit in changing the system so that their side can be heard rather than just ignored.) But in the short term, it feels as though the argument is only being presented as “us vs them” on both sides. And that’s generally a bad thing.
Who said anything about ‘a’ person? Liberal capitalist ideology favours individualism specifically to render you powerless in such situations.
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They don’t need a majority to gain power, and they never have.
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The sense of grievance is in many cases perfectly legitimate; it’s simply directed against the wrong people (hence racism, etc) out of a kind of cowardice.
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Yup.
But, so long as they’re a minority, it is usually possible to halt fascism without mass slaughter.
Gotta do it before they grab control of the state, though.
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Great article; If you’re unwilling to examine the forces driving these people into fear and desperation, you don’t want to know why they hate, and if you don’t know that, you can’t stop it through political means. This guy examines and describes that very clearly, and does so without ‘making excuses’ or ‘being dismissive’ which are often presented as the two options available.
Is there an historic example of fascism being halted without mass slaughter, without examining and resolving the social conditions of its emergence? I struggle to think of an example where within a single society, it has been successfully, peaceably, halted at all, once it begins to emerge.
