It never really went away in the first place. it was actively suppressed over the course of the Cold War in part because the Soviets were making propagandistic use of violence against the civil rights movement and we wanted to be able to bring decolonizing countries into our camp away from the Soviets. The intense racist nationalism has been here pretty much since the end of reconstruction (or before, really… Know Nothings and all that) and has never really gone away, I think. They’ve been empowered in new ways since the end of the Cold War though and the rise of Trump is a new wave of it.
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Yet all the edgy intellectual boys seem to dote on him… One can’t talk about popular culture without at least a modest reference to his stuff…
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Fair enough. Also that nazi. And rules for parallel parking.
They don’t know what that word means, and they definitely can’t spell it.
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He has a cunning plan…
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Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the Know Nothings quite a bit, lately. The difference being that I feel like we had just gotten to the point where the mainstream cultural discourse had finally decided, “This shit (racism, misogyny, homophobia) just isn’t acceptable.” And now it is, again, legitimized and organized into a political movement, rather than the unmentionable fringe (core) of the Republican party. At the same time, the progressives have failed to get their economic shit together, and we’ve seen the destruction of the unions and the hollowing out of the middle class, making regressive populism particularly attractive.
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I don’t disagree, really. I just see these sorts of politics as a bright thread in 19th and 20th century history, honestly and I don’t think that changed. I do think that the Cold War allowed these more reactive politics to be submerged in our public consciousness a bit. But the end of that existential threat really gave rise to those political impulses rising to the top yet again. Remember, too, that the term “communist” was (and still is) often used as coded language to talk about any sort of challenges to the white, hetero political system. Look at the way people talked about King (the paragon of the politics of respectability), as if he was some sort of communist (despite the fact that long-standing civil rights organizations purged their more radical wings in the 1940s and 1950s, just like everyone else.
You’re right about people not seeing real alternatives to this nasty sort of populism.
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I thought the 'Merican people were a little brighter than they appear to be, given trump’s rise, so clearly my prognostic-fu is damaged or offline. But, that nationalist thing scares the shit out of me as well.
Following the U.S. win in (IIRC) the men’s 4x4 relay, I cringed a little at Phelps’ yelling something about “…bringing this medal back to American soil…”. It’s a phrase heard here and there, yes, bringing a win back to home turf, and and nationalism is pretty tough to escape at the Olympics, but given the context of trumppence/Manafort/D.Duke, it still caught my ear.
Same.
I bet he’d be hell at a dinner party. “Yes, Zizek, but before we seize the economic reins to return the means of production to the working class would you please just pass the salt?”
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To be clear, the “anti-anti-intellectual” was as written – edgy intellectual boys would dote on him for that reason alone.
The edgy pseudo-intellectual boys who populate alt-right sites like Breitbart, in contrast, see him as an ivory tower Commie if they know about him at all.
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Yeah, that was definitely going on, but I guess I was thinking of the kind of reactionary politics embodied by Breitbart et al. as being a relatively recent, post-Cold War, reaction to what they deride as “political correctness,” that is, the mainstreaming of feminism, gay rights, increasing awareness of racism, etc.
Yeah, “communist” is synonymous with “un-American”* which really is used to mean “outsider.” So regardless of actual politics, it gets applied by these kinds of reactionaries to non-whites)/feminists/gays/etc. The Trumpists often skip the “communist” part and go straight to denying the American-ness of non-white people, of any ethnicity.
*I mean, it was in the name - the “Un-American Activity Committee,” that a family member of mine got brought before for being a communist in the '50s. He told the committee that it was they who were behaving in a manner contrary to American values, for which he got blacklisted.
When Bush actually got elected, I thought, “OK, this proves the American people are idiots.” Then I started thinking that wasn’t fair, that perhaps there were simply positions he took (that I disagreed strongly with) that did appeal to other people, and they were willing to overlook his lack of intelligence and his personality flaws. But no, tRump proves that a good percentage of Americans are, indeed, idiots. Racist idiots, no less.
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I don’t know about you, but I’d totally vote Eric B. for President.
Campaign slogan:
(Yes, I went there.)
ETA: As a youth I so totally coveted Rakim’s ridiculous rope chain.
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I’d take them as a package deal for president.
It’s a shame they appear to have had a falling out and aren’t on speaking terms anymore. They were one of the best rap groups of their era.
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Agreed.
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Hmm… my twin is a Harvard MBA, worked at Morgan Stanley and he presently has seven felonies under his belt. Bannon might need to step up his game.
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