For people born and raised with these ideas, reinforced throughout their entire lives by their family, neighbors, schoolmates, friends, community, and the media, you’re not going to just talk their culture out of them during a friendly chat over a cup of coffee.
For others, born and raised in more liberal culture, who always felt like outcasts or misfits until they latched onto it as their form of rebellion, there might conceivably be a chance that they’ll mellow out with age. But they’re finally part of an in group, feeling power, superiority, and a sense of purpose. And they’ve built up an internal narrative to support it against all those liberal ideas that they were raised with. So trying to use those liberal ideas to talk them out of it (into submitting and going back to being a powerless reject with no purpose in life) may not be all that effective.
These are not “scared boys and men (and women) who need some kind of help.” They’re indoctrinated to a culture where fear is an unacceptable weakness, self-sufficiency is a virtue (to the extreme of stockpiling survivalist gear) and if you need help you’re weak, the weak don’t deserve to survive, and helping weak people (other than your own inner circle) is evil communism. So talking to them about their fears and weaknesses, their needs for nurturing and compassion, and offering to help is not likely to be well received.
You might try asking them why they feel like victims, why they feel oppressed, why they feel like they’re the heroes standing up to evil. Because they are not saying “I’m a horrible, awful no good person”. They believe that they are the good guys. Remember, in their narrative, they are not the terrorists, they are the noble freedom fighters.
Agreed. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of society.
After WWII, no one became “not a Nazi,” they just became secret Nazis.
After the Civil War, no one became “not a racist” they just became new flavors of horrible.
At the end of these wars, people seem to be able to make concessions they would not make before - beaten into submission, not changed in any way.
How is this winning? How is this going to change things?
If they are the heroes in their own narrative, then are we also perhaps sharing in the same delusion - not that the people who are on the side of everyone having equality aren’t on the right side, but just, what if we have to build up the people on the other side into the image of monsters in order to feel so superior? What if we are not in a competition but in a society together with these people and we can’t win until we all win?
At the end of a war we’re all willing to sit down at a negotiation table and talk and listen to one another, but at the start it’s considered absurd, whiny, white privileged bullshit to do that. Is it possible that we can skip the brutality and spend more time on the negotiation at the start, knowing what is coming up ahead?
Is it possible to bust out of the wash/rinse/repeat cycle?
When you join a hate mob, but want sympathy for being the target of a mob formed in response to your own mob… That’s the kind of personal exceptionalism that unites these people. For many of them it’s not about racism, it’s about strength in numbers sought out from a fear of irrelevance. Walking away like a rational person - would be too huge an ego blow.
Just another redshirt who refuses to recognize we’re all redshirts.
Propose a realistic route from my Point A to your Point B, please.
It’s hardly a single step, a I don’t think we’re accelerating down a slippery slope - so lay it out for me, how will the sky fall? Don’t jump to the catastrophic end and work back. Start today and realistically think it through.
Yesterday you said all Trump would have to do is empower some LE agencies, wrangle the friendly militias, and bobs your uncle - america ends.
I disagree. Please, fear is easy. Fear is simple. We understand your fear.
Still plenty of time for solutions, but we will have to ignore the doom and gloomers to get there - so please - knock off the constant ‘fear along with me’ doom n gloom?
We’ve just had a week of Trumpeters declaring their desire to annihilate North Korea and their complete indifference for the consequences for South Korea.
And you have literal, overt, self-declared Nazis marching through the streets. Feeling no need to conceal their identities as they do so, and being supported by the executive even after they kill.
If the threat isn’t obvious, I don’t know what could make it more so.
Link? I don’t recall saying that.
I can avoid the gloom, or I can respond to the questions you just asked. I can’t do both.
There is still time for solutions. There is not “plenty of time”.
Whatever action to take is up to you, but the time is now.
Despair is bad. Fear is useful. Anger is essential.
Back in the 1990s when political correctness was a thing, we had what were called “moderate Republicans”. I think that moderate Republicans is a contradiction in terms, but that’s another discussion entirely. They tried to present themselves as basically normal people who maybe didn’t like taxes or liked guns or whatever, not as racists or religious freaks. However, their attitudes toward religion overwhelmingly but implicitly favored Christianity, and they either looked the other way or tacitly supported racism. It wasn’t surprising that every right-winger I tried to have a conversation with in those days was automagically a “moderate Republican”. It was good camouflage. Whenever anyone mentions bigotry, they would simply say they were one of the good guys, one of the moderates, and it was other people doing that stuff, and they personally cannot condemn it enough… all of the usual mouth farts.
If they won’t honestly admit to being bigots, how will they change?
Part of me thinks that racists being openly racist is a step in the right direction, because now they can’t deny who they are, and they can’t just greasily ooze into whichever incarnation of their political beliefs is the most socially acceptable. They are racist. They think things that I, as someone who isn’t racist, can’t even get my head around, and then use these positions as the linchpin in their political ideologies. They can’t walk it back anymore, they are who they are, they’ve self-selected out of the group of cool-guy moderate Republicans. Of course, the next logical step is:
But do not try to have a conversation with these people. They want genocide, not a conversation, and even the ones who appear nice and moderate and open to persuasion will never be willing to even admit to what they actually believe, let alone have a conversation about it.
He went to a very expensive private university on the East Coast, with people who come from money. He doesn’t exactly have a dearth of opportunity. Meanwhile, there are people scrimping and saving just to attend community college, and they are not only not Nazis, but they have held onto their liberal beliefs.
The idea that this is because of socioeconomic inequality is asinine and insulting.
Fascism is a middle-class pathology. It isn’t about resisting oppression, it’s about retaining privilege. When the working class get bloodthirsty, they go hardcore communist.
The American working class are heavily PoC, and were the only socioeconomic group that did not support Trump. They aren’t the fascists; they’re the fascists’ primary target.
I noticed early on that Trump’s popularity was because of aggrieved privilege, not because of inequality. But nobody was listening to me then, they just continued to compare Trump with Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders with Trump.
We’ve got to call this what it is: fascism. The fascists have made the first move by self-identifying as fascists. We have to believe them, and call them what they choose to call themselves, not stick our heads in the sand and call them scared little boys and disenfranchised poor people, both of which are gravely insulting to the victims of fascism.
This is the time to act, not react, and denying that fascists are fascists isn’t even up to the same level as reaction.
There are economic issues involved. Predatory American plutocracy has advanced so far that even the middle class were beginning to feel the effect. The poor in America are already fully exploited; the bosses needed new victims if they were going to continue getting richer.
But the middle class tend to live and work in communities that are much more racially and culturally homogenous than the working class. So they tend to be instinctively xenophobic. And they usually have a strong attachment to retaining their material wealth.
