Charles Manson notoriously believed race war would result in a Black ethnostate … with Manson, a white man, as its leader
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Not buying it, sorry.
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She doesn’t hate the government, she hates liberals and socialists (Not that socialists are relevant when the government is the US government). She will hate anarchists too because of their long history of anti-fascism.
If the government was fascist then she would love it.
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In fact, projection is kind of the direct opposite, huh? “I know how I think, no need to pay attention to whether this person might be any different.”
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Exactly so.
This isn’t to say that our “natural” state can’t also include being wary and suspicious of others, because that’s also been a means of protecting our communities. But clearly, we managed to get over that, and build larger communities, even well before civilization. People traveled, traded, and communicated with other groups for all of our existence. It’s true we came into conflict with people, and we sometimes can be defensive, but it’s never been just rugged individuals carving their way in the world. Never. Empathy is central to our survival, and the stigmatizing of others who might be different in some way is obviously destructive and dangerous, and those two impulses (which are inevitably shaped by whatever culture we happen to be living in) need to be balanced against one another.
At this point in human history, whether we like it or not, we live in a globalized society. And those warring ways of thinking about the world (empathetic vs. tribalist) must shift towards the empathetic, or we’re all fucked. All of our well-being depends on uprooting the damage that capitalism has done to our sense of community (and to the whole fucking planet, etc, etc), and finding a more productive way forward. We’re destroying ourselves when we destroy who we perceive to be “the stranger”… How can anyone on this rock now really be a stranger anymore! Have we really not learned anything at this point about our common humanity?
Exactly this, too. They still keep claiming that they are “small government conservatives” but it’s clearly bullshit now, and really has always been bullshit. People should pay mind to what they do, not to what they keep claiming.
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I suspect any hatred of liberals and socialists she has is ultimately a byproduct of her racism.
She grew up in Cecil County, historically a bastion of racism.
On a relevant note, its neighbor Harford County was the childhood home of John Wilkes Booth. You can visit the family home if you’d like. See “history come alive as you walk where the Booth family walked, lived, played, worked and dreamed.”
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Something I think is worth pointing out that even wars, our most destructive endeavors, are still fundamentally cooperative. Chimpanzees will raid each other but they won’t marshal armies with strangers. They won’t stand and fight in a line, risking their life for the sake of some guy they might never have met before. Those are human things. They depend on suppressing empathy for the enemy, but they still also depend on working together. Everything notable we do as a species does, whether for good or ill.
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It seems interesting that this is almost always something that ethnic nationalist types are into as well. Almost never in a commie sort of way, at least in the American context; but they hate the fact that reducing everyone to fungible market participant theoretically means treating anyone whose money is green enough as human, regardless of any other factors.
Not uncommonly combined with (or even pushed into the background by) a more specific nativist screed about how displacement of the right sort of people by cheaper imports is a ‘globalist’ conspiracy rather than an obvious outcome of labor market commodification(if one wishes to cling to the idea that glorious true-50s-'Murica featured both capitalism and ethnically just outcomes you need some excuse for why the invisible hand you are nostalgic about behaved differently that doesn’t involve the ‘capitalism’ you remember actually being vastly more tightly constrained; hence dragging in a jew cabal to paper over inconsistencies); but the notion that capitalist ideals of fungibility destroyed ‘community’ ability to organically reject the xeno seems to crop up extremely reliably.
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Our superpowers (empathy, making culture) can be weaponized for the powers that be…
Because those things are intertwined, I’d argue.
But capitalism as a culture has never avoided racism. It was built on the backs of people who were stolen and enslaved, and that enslavement was justified because they happened to have more melanin than other people…
That old antisemitic trope was both used to argue for and against capitalism, though, among fascists. They publicly oppose capitalism, but also communism. But their ACTIONS tell us that they want the profits of capitalism to accrue to only a few elites, not to destroy the capitalist system. Just look at who is funding these movements today (Thiel, Musk, almost the whole billionaire class, etc).
I’m not sure I get your point here?
But again, fascists never really reject capitalism, only seek to bend it to their will, so they blame some outgroup (usually Jewish people) to get the masses to back their genocidal program, so that they can keep accruing the benefits of the capitalist system to themselves. If people are distracted by “those people” and eliminating them in order to “purify” society, then they aren’t looking to those that are doing the actual oppressing.
Just look at what Vance is doing in this campaign. It’s TEXTBOOK fascist strategy. He’s an acolyte of Thiel, and look what sort of racist shit he’s stirring up in Ohio. He’s not stupid. He knows it’s a lie. He knows that immigrants are not a threat to American jobs. He knows that the Haitian community is not eating pets and that they’re in Springfield legally. But he’s actively distracting from who is funding Trump’s campaign, and who is seeking to emiserate all of us for their own economic gains.
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I saw simonize’s statement as less “projection is a type of empathy” and more “projection is what assholes have instead of empathy”.
They are, as you say, almost diametric opposites. But they are on the same axis in that they both feel like “I know what’s happening in that person’s head” — but where empathy is “… because I am making an effort to model their mindstate”, projection is “… because I am assuming that their mindstate is the same as mine”.
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Projection is just the thinnest justification to do to others before they do unto you. The more uncharitably you can view others, the more justified you are in all your worst impulses.
I’d be shocked finding an asshole who didn’t justify their actions as pre-emptively defending against everyone being worse. Folks will say “The world sucks, so why shouldn’t I be the one making it suck?” as if the whole endeavor doesn’t just make you more miserable, anyways.
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